Cloud Confusion

I must hear the words cloud computing twenty times a day — on NPR, on television, and endlessly in the blogosphere. Last month Pat Condon and I were at lunch with a Rackspace customer who is a genuine technologist. He put his hands in the air and asked what the heck it actually means.

Here is the whole of it. Cloud computing is computing delivered over the web. That is it. Simple to say, and a very powerful idea whose time has arrived.

Why now? Because it is cheaper and better at the same time, and those two qualities rarely travel together. When they do, things change quickly.

There is a precedent. Our great-grandparents burned wood and coal to make energy at home. Almost nobody generates their own power now; we buy it from companies who build plants at a scale no household could justify, and it arrives over a grid at the speed of light. Computing is following the same path, and the plants are data centres.

The category will keep evolving, and computing will keep changing form. It will move out of the server closet and into places we have not thought to look yet.