Web Platforms - Doing Business in the Cloud (Cearley and Smith)

Session: Web Platforms - Doing Business in the Cloud (Cearley and Smith)

Key Notes and Thoughts (by Ed Vazquez):

• Definition of Cloud: Services delivered over the internet using internet technologies as a service. Characterized by access to data and capabilities as a result of community, elastic, consumer-inspired, and spanning the network in a distributed manner. The "cloud" is not a stand-alone platofrm that is always purchased. In Ed's words, computing on the cloud basically means you didn't have to buy the hardware and software and configure and optimize it prior to deploying code - you just pick a pre-configured cloud and and design and deploy your software on a 'virtually (hardware cost) free' cloud platform. What hasn't been addressed by Gartner is "What happens when you have to charge consumers for optimization and maintenance of the cloud?" "What happens when you have applications and data that can't run on shared environments because of legal / regulatory compliance issues?"
  
  
• Examples of services on a cloud: Amazon EC2, S3, FPS, MTurk, FWS, DP, EZ Prints, salesforce.com, fore.com, Google App Enginge - consumers access, configure and / or extend the service and builds everything needed above the service boundary. In Ed's words, service consumers do the same thing during integration as they've always done, the provider service is just either on a cloud or not on a cloud.
  
  
• Development and Execution Models: Mashup (internal application accesses external service), Cloud Execution (internal build / store - production in the cloud), Full Cloud (everything in the cloud), and Hybrid. Smith maintains that it is best to start out with Full Cloud or Cloud Execution. In Ed's words, you can start anywhere, but more than likely you're going to start doing everything local and not on the cloud and hopefully, you can get to doing everything on the cloud, ideally. That said, this discussion lacked a critical discussion on the data / functionality that is typically regulated by corporate policy and, thus, appropriate models for corporate clouds vs. consumer clouds. In the future, I believe that Gartner will need to clearly distinguish and steal the "Corporate Cloud vs Consumer Cloud" paradigm for making future arguments for / against Cloud computing.
  
  
• Web Vendors leading the charge: Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc.
  
  
• Leading Vendors in the Game (Microsoft "Live" mesh and IBM OnDemand Blue Cloud and iDataplex and a partnership with Google).
  
  
• Some companies are beginning to build on their technology / IT excellence and monetize their technology platforms (Amazon). Some companies such as Wal-Mart, P&G, T-Mobile are positioned to where their supply chain and billing capabilities could be made available as a platform. In Ed's words, a company can establish a brand because of their competencies in Service Enablement and Platform Enablement. Gartner had the same assertions years ago around SOA that they now profess with Cloud Computing. Still, the monetization of cloud platforms is probably years away and aspects such as data security, bandwith monitoring, and SLA enforcements have yet to be identified by any leaders. Cloud computing is great for small, consumer applications at this point, but is nowhere near ready for Enterprise deployments. Still there may be opportunities for co-opetition for industry sectors and partners to leverage cloud computing technologies, canonical data models, canonical service models and integration methodologies to partner to build core platform functionality at a reduced cost to each - and out-position competitors. Cloud computing could enable soft-mergers of competitors seeking operational efficiencies in their platform development efforts. Less money on hardware and software may mean more money for actual application development and better, more agile business applications (Imagine not having to wait for hardware to be purchased, procured, configured, deployed, etc on small projects! The end of long lines in capacity planning! Rejoice. Rejoice)
  
  
• Nail-On-The-Head-ing Factor: 35%. Until the analysts begin to differentiate between Corporate Clouds and Consumer Clouds, the discussion will be too generalized to be useful for Corporate citizens to implement Enterprise Applications on "Clouds" that major platform vendors don't even support or have best-practices for in deployment "on a cloud."