Cloud Computing Sceptic

I just finished reading a new book on Cloud Computing called “Cloud Application Architectures: Building Applications and Infrastructure in the Cloud” by George Reece. If you are looking for a concise overview of cloud computing and the Amazon Cloud Infrastructure (EC2, S3 etc) then it is worth a read. It leans towards the technical side more than just being an executive summary.

I am sceptical about cloud computing becoming as prevalent as the marketing buzz says.

What is the core selling point? The “cloud” can provide massive scalability in terms of computing power. But this is only applicable for those very few companies who need to scale very quickly on an ongoing basis or perhaps just periodically, just like Amazon does.

Amazon has massive traffic coming to their sites and has huge peaks around holiday seasons. They need to be able to scale quickly. They don’t want to invest hugely in IT just so they can accommodate the peak demand. This would leave underutilised computing capacity during the non-peaks. Have they now just come up with a great way of selling their spare capacity and profiting on providing additional capacity beyond that? Remember that Amazon were the leaders in cloud computing before other vendors followed them.

Most companies don’t need this scalability. In fact it would be easier, and cheaper (currently), to use a managed hosted server rather than the cloud options from Amazon.

The “cloud” is also very unreliable. If you set up some virtual servers on Amazons cloud infrastructure you have to plan for these to fail, they absolutely will fail and more often than a physical server in your data centre. Now you have a whole new learning curve.

My list of major concerns for Cloud Computing:

• More Expensive
• Less Reliable (this can be mitigated but there is a large learning curve, do you need another layer of complexity in maintaining and developing systems?)
• Security is a major issue that needs to be planned for
• Little or no portability between the different cloud vendors (lack of standards)
• Licencing issues. Not all software vendors have licencing options for scenarios where you are using their software in the cloud (per hour licencing versus per server licencing)

Lets see how cloud computing evolves…