Is that distributed cloud computing on the horizon?

December 1st, 2008

A hundred years ago, companies stopped generating their own power with steam engines and dynamos and plugged into the newly built electric grid. The cheap power pumped out by electric utilities didn’t just change how businesses operate. It set off a chain reaction of economic and social transformations that brought the modern world into existence. Today, a similar revolution is under way. Hooked up to the Internet’s global computing grid, massive information-processing plants have begun pumping data and software code into our homes and businesses. This time, it’s computing that’s turning into a utility.

The shift is already remaking the computer industry, bringing new competitors like Google and Salesforce.com to the fore and threatening stalwarts like Microsoft and Dell. But the effects will reach much further. Cheap, utility-supplied computing will ultimately change society as profoundly as cheap electricity did. We can already see the early effects — in the shift of control over media from institutions to individuals, in debates over the value of privacy, in the export of the jobs of knowledge workers, even in the growing concentration of wealth. As information utilities expand, the changes will only broaden, and their pace will only accelerate.

writes Nicholas Carr in his book the Big Switch

John Naughton writes

Google Trends reveals that ‘cloud computing’ first starts to figure in queries in 2007. Interest grew slowly until April this year, when Salesforce.com announced a deal with Google. There’s another peak in July, when Yahoo, Intel and HP announced they were collaborating with several universities to set up cloud computing labs. This week’s news from Amazon will doubtless produce an even bigger spike in Google searches by people wondering what’s going on.

he adds

Why is this so important? Because,

Carrs analogy is that of electricity generation: once, most companies had their own generators; now they buy electricity from big utilities. Computing, he says, is heading in the same direction, and for many of the same reasons. By using infrastructure as a service, basic IT costs are moved from a capital expense to a variable cost, building clearer relationships between expenditures and revenue-generating activities.’

Irving Wladawsky-Berger is Chairman Emeritus of the IBM Academy of Technology. He Presented his theory on cloud computing

In my own presentation, following Nick Carr, I also framed cloud computing in sort of historical terms. First, I think of what is going on with IT as a kind of Cambrian Explosion, which is the period over 500 million years ago when the rate of evolution accelerated by an order of magnitude, giving rise to both more complex animals and a far greater diversity of organisms. This was at least partly due to the fact that the cell had been perfected and standardized over the preceding billion years, so evolution could now focus its energies in using these essentially commoditized cells in far more complex and diverse ways.

Looking at the Cambrian Explosion as a metaphor, we can think of digital components as following the path of cells in biology. In its first few decades, the IT industry spent a considerable fraction of its energies developing the basic components. But now that they are essentially standardized, commoditized and good enough for most purposes, we are seeing both the emergence of massively scalable systems—i.e., cloud data centers

Naughton comments

The Cambrian period triggered a staggering increase in the pace of evolutionary development, as measured by the rate at which species appeared and disappeared. For some of our most established IT companies, Vogels’s cloud may have a darker lining than they expect.

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