Cloud evoluntion

[brd]

AFAIK these are the main characteristics of a cloud:

1 - A highly standard environment (to enable economies of scale)
2 - Dynamic (to deliver flexibility of processing power to the
application owner)

When setting up a cloud, characteristic 1 is relatively easy (you have
to select the correct standards but that should not be too difficult)
and, with virtualisation, so is characteristic 2.

However, I've been thinking about how the cloud would/could evolve
over time.

Scenario 1. The cloud standards don't change.
The consequences of this would seem to be that a particular cloud
would have a limited life after which another cloud with a different
(better) set of standards would take over in terms of usefulness.

Scenario 2 The cloud supports multiple, concurrent standards. This
would allow new (better) standards to be available in the cloud.
The consequences of this would seem to be that the cloud would start
to bog down with multiple environments and the advantage of economies
of scale would start to dissipate.

Scenario 3 The cloud supports multiple, serial standards. This would
force everyone to upgrade as the cloud changes its standards. In this
case there would be additional costs of the cloud that would need to
be taken into account when planning and making a decision to move into
a cloud.

Have I got this correct? Are there any other scenarios?

brd
Canberra
Australia

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[Sam Johnston]

Hi,

1. By "highly standard environment" I guess you're referring to the
generic nature of cloud services - that is, delivering the same
service to many users (e.g. email, calendar, storage, x86
virtualisation, etc.) rather than specific applications (e.g. wind
tunnel analysis, which would instead be uploaded as a workload to a
generic service like App Engine or EC2). The result of multiple
providers offering identical services is commoditisation - where the
only differentiator is price.
2. Cloud services often are, but don't necessarily need to be dynamic.
If I buy a Google Apps account to manage a non-profit with 12 board
members and will always have 12 accounts then am I still benefiting
from cloud computing? How about if I upload an x86 virtual machine to
EC2 and host a web site on it? Sure I am. For all the talk about "on
demand", many/most cloud services operate under a relatively static
load.

Sam
Google