The Mysteries Of Consciousness

The last month or two has been distinctly cloudy, every hosting , telecommunications or commercial company I have spoken to had a single topic on their mind ,cloud computing and what the potential impact will be on their future.The most interesting discussions are with enterprise hosting related companies and shared enterprise data-center operators, where the confusion around “cloud” seem to be most prevalent. Even in this confusion every enterprise co-location, hosting provider and shared data-center owner I spoke to expressed an urgent interest to move into the cloud space, or at least what they perceived to be the cloud space.

The  “xyz as a service” market is currently split into two separate models, with the divide being most clear in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market, a market of particular interest to current enterprise hosting providers and shared data-center operators as it has the potential of eroding their current business.

The first model is the enterprise environments as we know today, dominated by large enterprise software providers like Oracle and SAP. The second is the newer market dominated by the Amazon’s of the world. This second market I refer to as Commercial Commodity Computing rather than cloud computing to get away from the cloud confusion. The first trend centers around who leads and who follows in these two markets.

Infrastructure and applications

Trend - Who leads and who follows

Traditional Enterprise

In the enterprise market the infrastructure architecture is dictated by software applications. If you plan a deployment for 100 users you buy a small server. If you plan to deploy for 2000 users you buy a large server. There is no getting around this, nearly all popular enterprise applications have been developed to a deployment model where horizontal scaling is not a first class citizen. In this space the application architecture is fixed and the infrastructure deployment variable.

Commercial Commodity Computing

In the commercial commodity computing space, the application architecture adapts to the infrastructure. As the infrastructure in this space is mostly fixed in dimensions, the application architecture has to adapt to what is available. A good example of how fixed the dimensions are is Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud where you have a choice of small, large or extra-large. The application architecture has to fit in this mold to make use of the service. If an application does not fit in one of these molds the only alternative is for the application architecture to be adapted to make use of multiple “servers” or instances to satisfy the requirement. In this space the infrastructure deployment architecture is fixed forcing the application architecture to adapt.

Trend – Buy vs Build

As the commercial commodity computing market is relatively young when compared to the established enterprise software market , developing applications is currently much more prevalent than buying commercial applications. This market is in a similar stage to the enterprise market a few years back when large corporations developed most of their systems in-house, from financial systems to human resource and payroll systems. As the fixed deployment infrastructure building block architecture model becomes more wide spread I expect it to mature in a very similar way to the enterprise model. To a stage where the available commercial applications will be naturally suited for deployment in the commercial commodity computing space.