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05.22.09
The Understanding And Implementation Of Cloud Computing
 By Mike Kavis
I have been to my share of conferences and webinars on cloud computing the last two years and I have also read the content of many colleagues who live blog, blog, and/or tweet at cloud conferences as well. What I am finding is that most of the talking is being done by vendors, analysts, security gurus, and people who just flat our resist change.
All four of these perspectives are extremely important, but the missing perspective is the one from architects who are actually building enterprise solutions in the cloud. Rewind about four or five years and this is very familiar to the early SOA days.
To make matters worse, I am not convinced that many of the vendors are clear on what cloud computing is. Every day I read blogs and tweets where people are arguing what the definitions mean, what the pros and cons are, and if the cloud is even secure enough to consider for anything mission critical. There is a heck of a lot of talking going on that's for sure. But how many of those talking the talk are walking the walk? Which brings me to the question, "If you haven't got your hands dirty, why should I listen to you?"
I think the issue is that we are so early in the hype cycle that many enterprises are taking the wait and see approach. Others are using the cloud for simple projects that don't require architectural changes. Also, many early adopters are startups and small businesses who don't typically spend a great deal of time focusing on architecture anyways.
I am calling out to my fellow cloud practitioners to start sharing your lessons learned evaluating cloud computing or implementing systems or services in the cloud. Right now there is too much vendor influence. Most of the information the analysts are discussing is being sourced from vendor conferences, blogs, or PR calls. Without hearing the voice of reality from practitioners, we could be setting ourselves for failure like we have seen with big SOA initiatives over the past few years. I have been sharing as much information about our hybrid cloud solution as I can without giving away company secrets (it's a fine line to walk). But I am not finding a lot of other blogs sharing design concepts or lessons learned. If you know of some please let me know.
So I am begging the vendors and analysts who are out on the speaking circuit promoting cloud computing, "Please give us some real life customer case studies and/or lessons learned". By now we should all know what the acronyms are, what the risks are, and what the benefits are. Now we need to know how. And it is never a good idea to learn the how from a vendor. We need to learn the how from people in the trenches. We need to discuss enterprise cloud initiatives, not server consolidation stories, adhoc offload processing stories, or user solution cloud stories. We need examples of companies leveraging the cloud to do something mission critical, something that drives mass change within the organization, or something that delivers incredible business value.
So to the vendors, analysts and others. Bring us some customer stories that practitioners can learn from. Tell me something of value. Let's get away from theory and talk about reality. Let's talk about how we can address the concerns about security and compliance (yes, they are doable in the cloud). Let's not relive the cycle of hype, hope, and failure that we did with SOA and many other buzzwords from days gone past. Let's stop talking the talk and let's start walking the walk!
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About the Author:
Mike Kavis is a veteran Chief Architect with over 23 years of IT experience including distributed computing, SOA, BPM, data warehouse, business intelligence, and enterprise architecture. Read Mike's blog at Enterprise Initiatives.
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