Raining on the Cloud

A thorn in my side, as of late, has been the Wikipedia article on Cloud Computing. Describing yet another newly coined buzzword for distributed computing, this article contains many examples of of the worst of Wikipedia, and reminds me of some of the articles I have been subjected to by SoA fundamentalists (and and before them, that of the CORBA-cultists, etc).

Cloud, as in Network Cloud

The concept of Cloud Computing originated as a analogy to the network cloud, a mainstay of whiteboard and Visio diagrams everywhere. Thus, in order to understand what it means, one must consider what a network cloud means. Fortunately, this is simple to answer and relatively un-contentious: all a network cloud means is "the stuff we don't have to worry about". It's infrastructure. It's the stuff that we can let the network and/or the networking people figure out how to make work, and by ignoring those details, allows us focus on the problem at hand.

If we take this concept of the network cloud and apply it to computing, we end up with "The practice of using known resources to provide computational services as a component of solving a larger problem." Just like that network cloud in the diagram indicates that we don't care how the packets get from site A to B, cloud computing allows us to not worry about how and where computation is performed.

Distributed Computing, Renamed, Yet Again

When viewed from this perspective, cloud computing is just yet another flavour of distributed computing, one where computational services are provided over a network, typically the Internet. The fact that the users of these services does not have to own, control, manage or even be aware of how the service is provided, is important, but not ground-breaking. The only key difference is that the service contract and information hiding resulting from a well-defined and managed service allows application complexity to be built on top of the services without having to worry about their implementation or operation.

When it all works, that is...