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Apparently officials in the UK discovered that one of their supercomputers used to model climate change is one of the worst contributors to “pollution” in the UK. First, you have to consider CO2 to be a pollutant in order to see the irony here. Second, environmentalist are aiming their sights on datacenters and cloud providers. Here’s the deal. Say we rolled back the clock and used people, lead pencils, paper, and slide rulers to perform these calculations. Also assume we have to feed, house, and transport these people. My guess is that the supercomputer and datacenter would come out far ahead in terms of CO2 contribution. That’s just a guess.
With almost a touch of schadenfreude Gartner explains that cloud computing has reached the peak of inflated expectations and is now headed towards the trough of disillusionment.
I think this is all a matter of perspective. Yes, cloud computing is way over hyped in technology circles. But business — especially SMB’s — are at a different point in the hype cycle.
The SMB’s still don’t understand cloud computing or why it matters to their business. Most SMB’s aren’t trying to be social networks or coding web 2.0 jockeys or building the next iphone app. They are manufacturing, designing, installing, and servicing stuff in the real world. What they care about most is cost; and then reliability. They don’t care if the service is called shared hosting, or VPS, or cloud computing — as long as it just works.
I don’t blame service providers for the hype. I blame software vendors that are trying to sell cloud computing-in-a-box and editors that are looking for more clicks.
Here’s an interesting article from a research group in Australia that performed a 7-month stress test of the Amazon, Google, and Microsoft cloud. Not surprisingly they found differing levels of service and capabilities between these cloud providers.
The synopsis: cloud vendors performance can vary by a factor of twenty depending on workloads and time of day. None of the clouds today have real SLA’s or QOS (quality of service) characteristics built into the infrastructure. It’s the wild west in the clouds right now.
BTW, I found this article through a Linkedin group called the Cloud Hosting & Service Providers Forum. It’s becoming a pretty good resource for learning about innovation in the cloud.
Jon Greaves from Carpathia Hosting described an interesting hybrid-cloud analogy relating hosting service offerings to the auto industry. I heard Jon present this analogy during a webinar sponsored by storage cloud vendor Parascale this week.
- Colocation = purchase a car, maintain a car yourself
- Managed services = lease a car, lease holder maintains the car
- Cloud computing = rent a car by the hour/day
You could also say that colocation is like owning a condo, managed services like renting an apartment, and cloud computing like a hotel room. And hopefully that hotel room isn’t like those rooms that are rented by-the-hour. 
