The term Cloud Computing encompasses a number of technologies that have been maturing over the past 20 years as well as a couple of decade-old concepts. The technologies used include HTTP, HTML, OpenID, Atom, AJAX, Hardware Virtualization, Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, XML, JSON and REST, to name a few. These technologies when combined in a highly-available data center are used to provide very reliable applications and infrastructure for a company, organization, or group of people. When you cut to the heart of it, that’s really all Cloud Computing does – provides better Internet-based services to the general public.
The real shame is that the media and the IT darlings are doing a fantastic spin-job on making all of this stuff sound far more exciting than its homely outward appearance. Worse, they’re plastering over all of the cracks to make it sound like the only way you would ever want to build a new website is using “Cloud Computing” technologies.
To be fair and clear – the technologies used to deliver the thing called Cloud Computing can be beneficial and useful to those who understand what they do, but beware of people and companies that say that Cloud Computing is the next big thing.
Just like the dot-com boom, the resulting dot-com bust, peer-to-peer, and Web 2.0, Cloud Computing should be used as a term to describe how the general public thinks about the Web from 2008 to around 2012. It should not be used to describe a competitive advantage because it is an incredibly vague term that is very easy to deliver to anybody that asks for it. Most companies operating on the web now can claim to have expertise in Cloud Computing – they would not be lying.
Remember when every Internet-based company was describing itself as a “Web 2.0″ company? “Cloud Computing” is the new “Web 2.0″. An increasing number of companies are going to start describing themselves as “Cloud Computing” organizations – because it sounds cool, but mostly because it is such a low bar to reach.
If Cloud Computing is such a low bar to reach, why are people getting so excited about it?
