Peter Kretzman at CTO/CIO Persepectives points out a serious problem with tech journalism in his article on cloud computing. Sometimes the message gets oversimplified.
Mainstream media drifts into this oversimplification in part because they’re leery of delving into technical arcania (virtualization, scalable architectures, APIs) that many of their readers can’t relate to. Yet, there’s actually no need, when you try to explain its real impact, to make cloud computing sound geeky and complicated; it’s not, at least at core.
Kretzman specifically points out examples from Business Week and NPR, which equates consumer-facing Web 2.0 technologies and SaaS apps such as GMail, YouTube, and Flickr to “cloud computing” as a whole.
To be sure, these applications certainly are “cloud computing,” but it’s just one example of what cloud computing is – and not the best example, because it seems to limit cloud computing to Web-based applications with data storage on the Internet.
Cloud computing is more accurately described as renting IT resources when they are needed instead of owning them. Sometimes you are talking about applications – using Google Apps instead of Microsoft Exchange. Sometimes you’re talking about servers – using the computing power of big iron to supplement your medium-sized iron for those stubborn tasks, like trying to find the Higgs Boson, mapping known space, or making the best possible Fantasy Football picks. And sometimes you’re talking about the network – using co-location to lower latency and provide more throughput to highly trafficked sites like CNN.com, YouTube.com, or ICanHasCheezburger.com.
Hmm… application, server, network… where have I seen that collection before? Oh – that’s right. That’s the three sources of network performance problems – sometimes the problem is in the application, sometimes it’s in the server, and sometimes it’s in the network. The problem with cloud computing from a network performance perspective is that when application, server, and network were in-house, you could find out which one of them was the problem relatively quickly and start fixing it.
But I digress. The real reason I’m worried? Cloud computing doubles the applications – and sometimes the networks – needed to do business. Poor application performance could be caused by a poorly coded application – or is Firefox having a memory leak? And the application is no longer from client to server and back. Now you have client, to server, to cloud server, back to server, to client. Fixing performance problems in this environment isn’t impossible, but it requires good monitoring solutions and an even better brain in the engineer doing the manual monitoring.
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