There were three - count ‘em - three seminar/conferences held in June 2008 entitled Cloud Computing. As a concept, it’s certainly picking up steam as ‘the new,’ and the world seems to be starting to understand that it will be moving towards using Cloud Computing, particularly at the enterprise level. Tonight I went to a VLAB (MIT/Stanford Venture Lab) for a conference on “Cloud Computing: creating value for Web 2.0 Apps.”
I was surprised and pretty proud to find, of a room of 300+ people, and seven speakers, that we at GoPC really have got a strong handle on what cloud computing is, how it works, and what it can do. I was actually disappointed that I didn’t learn much new - but heartened to find out that we know a great deal more than many.
Google, Amazon, etc. know a lot about their implementation of it. Many other providers, coat-tail riders and bandwagon jumpers are really still trying to get their heads around it.
95% of the discussion related to just the network infrastructure level; that is, using Xen or VMWare to virtualise servers and people like Amazon with the S3 architecture renting out virtual servers - all this is at the data center infrastructure level. There was hardly any discussion of the Cloud at the application layer, and certainly not at the presentation layer.
Not to toot my own whistle, but we’ve been using Xen and other technology to make good use of servers at that level, but the real magic is that we’ve created a fully integrated cloud at the application layer and presentation layer. Nobody else has done this anywhere. By comparison (against what I saw today), we’ve got the most comprehensive example of a fully integrated cloud computing environment going. Not too shabby.