The Case Against Cloud Computing, Part One
I've had a series of interesting conversations with people involved in cloud computing who, paradoxically, maintain that cloud computing is -- at least today -- inappropriate for enterprises.
I say paradoxically because each of them works for or represents a large technology company's cloud computing efforts, and one would think their role would motivate them to strongly advocate cloud adoption. So why the tepid enthusiasm? For a couple of them, cloud computing functionality is really not ready for prime time use by enterprises. For others, cloud computing is too ambiguous a term for enterprises to really understand what it means. For yet others, cloud computing doesn't-and may never-offer the necessary functional factors that enterprise IT requires. While I think the observations they've made are trenchant, I'm not sure I'm convinced by them as immutable problems that cannot be addressed.
I thought it would be worthwhile to summarize the discussions and identify and discuss each putative shortcoming. I've distilled their reservations and present them here. I've also added my commentary on each issue, noting a different interpretation of the issue that perhaps sheds a little less dramatic light upon it and identifies ways to mitigate the issue.
There are five key impediments to enterprise adoption of cloud computing, according to my conversations. I will discuss each in a separate posting for reasons of length. The five key impediments are:
- Current enterprise apps can't be migrated conveniently
- Risk: Legal, regulatory, and business
- Difficulty of managing cloud applications
- Lack of SLA
- Lack of cost advantage for cloud computing
Current enterprise apps can't be migrated conveniently. Each of the major cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, salesforce force, Google App Engine, and Microsoft Azure) imposes an architecture dissimilar to the common architectures of enterprise apps.
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Virtualization
I think virtualization is a key component of the entire cloud movement that helps to mitigate some of the concerns stated above. If a user can get to the point of deploying pre-built configurations (operating systems, middleware, etc.) into a cloud, then the deployment skills needed for specific applications are left to the operating system/middleware the application was originally written for. The cloud infrastructure could become more of a provisioner/manager of these, and other, configurations.Good points, another big issue is that it is not Open!
First generation cloud offerings like Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine are closed and limited in terms of programming languages supported abd development tools. The next generation will be cloud computing combined with Open Platform as a Service (OPaaS), (e.g., ModBox, http://www.sullivansoftwaresystems.com/modbox)バッテリー
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