Same story as my previous post on the event; I’m still trying to fully digest all of the information and ideas presented. Whilst I research further I thought I’d share some of the comments and soundbites (mostly paraphrased) a took a note of during the event, which are currently bouncing around my head.
(If any of the speakers feel these are mis-quoted or out of context, please let me know)
Reading back through my notes, I find it interesting that most of these could relate equally well to any form of IT-based service, feeding back into my original feeling that cloud computing isn’t especially new but is simply the evolution of other shared IT frameworks (main-frames, multi-user systems, etc.). Which brings me nicely to my first quote:
The ideas and technologies behind cloud computing aren’t new; it is the billing model that is innovative and creating opportunities.
Use multiple cloud providers to ensure tolerance to failure
Balance the cost of a failure against the cost of mitigating the risk
Run a business/service expecting failures to happen, and plan accordingly
Contractual SLAs are not insurance against failure
Security issues related to Cloud computing aren’t new or worse than security issues within traditional architectures, they’re just more visible
Traditional systems don’t scale well within a cloud architecure
Todays archicture and system components will evolve to be more efficient with a cloud based environment
The cost of failure is often the biggest cost of IT systems
Traditional licensing models for OS and applications needs to evolve to match the requirements of cloud based services
And finally, which was said with a wry smile:
Cloud computing is good news for consultants
Being there, I’d say those quotes are pretty representative of the talks and panel conversation.
I think the most important, though, is your own view – Cloud Computing isn’t especially new and the challenges it presents aren’t particularly new, but the solutions are new. There’s a great opportunity to solve the old problems much more easily for the small guy – for example, having more than one data centre to avoid outages.