What cloud computing is NOT
The Wall Street Journal just published an article trying to define cloud computing. Although hardly anyone can be faulted for not understanding the cloud (ahem) of jargon spewing from every marketing department of every IT department scrambling to be relevant without actually innovating, I wanted to help by offering a sort of proof by contradiction.
By examining the types of companies and technologies claimed to be “cloud computing” (by themselves, or others), and then showing that what they are providing has been around for many years and already has its own label, we can hopefully narrow down what exactly is the important bit about cloud computing.
So…what cloud computing is NOT…
- Gmail, google docs, salesforce.com, and etc. These things are simply web-based services, or SaaS, or even PaaS if you want to get fancy. This type of technology has been around and evolving at least for a decade. It may be getting popular and significant now, but it doesn’t warrant a new jargon term.
- Running your software distributed among many computers. This is called grid computing, parallel computing, and so on. It’s been around in one form or another for decades, and again, does not warrant a new jargon term.
- From the WSJ article: “In it’s broadest sense, cloud computing describes [...] Information is stored and processed on computers somewhere else — “in the clouds” — and brought back to your screen.”. No, that’s called the Internet. See also client/server, server side processing, thin clients, take your pick.
- “A company’s backroom mass of servers and switches is cloudlike.” - No, that’s a datacenter. There’s nothing significantly more cloudlike about it today than there was ten years ago.
- Just a marketing term. Cloud computing is a significant change in how businesses acquire and pay for computing resources.
See more: Storing your stuff online is not cloud computing, What is Cloud Computing?
Shameless plug: Elastic Server will have you running in the cloud in minutes.
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