“The Cloud” is Now Meaningless

I guess it was inevitable. It started with “Cloudwashing” where PR folks started calling everything the cloud. Now we are to the point where the “cloud” simply means “not on my computer”.

When Aon eSolutions claims to be “the original cloud provider to the risk insurance and safety community” you know the term cloud has no real meaning.

I guess it should be flattering to Origami. At first, competitors were telling prospects not to use us because the cloud is scary. Now they are saying they’ve been cloud all along.

But cloud computing has real meaning. It’s about being able to harness resources on the fly with drastically reduced costs.

Here’s a simple example. Microsoft is close to releasing the new version of SQL Server, “Denali”. Everyone is excited about the new capabilities. There’s a release candidate out there to test. But it’s a bit of a pain to buy a new server, install Windows and everything else and then install Denali.

Amazon and Microsoft got together so that Amazon EC2 can offer a pre-built image of Denali. So we can bring up a Denali server to test with a click at minimal cost. That’s the cloud.

I always go back to Werner Vogels description of the key benefits of a true cloud. His point was that if your “cloud” doesn’t have these benefits then it’s not a cloud:

The cloud:

• Eliminates Cost. The cloud changes capital expense to variable expense and lowers operating costs. The utility-based pricing model of the cloud combined with its on-demand access to resources eliminates the needs for capital investments in IT Infrastructure. And because resources can be released when no longer needed, effective utilization rises dramatically and our customers see a significant reduction in operational costs.
• Is Elastic. The ready access to vast cloud resources eliminates the need for complex procurement cycles, improving the time-to-market for its users. Many organizations have deployment cycles that are counted in weeks or months, while cloud resources such as Amazon EC2 only take minutes to deploy. The scalability of the cloud no longer forces designers and architects to think in resource-constrained ways and they can now pursue opportunities without having to worry how to grow their infrastructure if their product becomes successful.
• Removes Undifferentiated “Heavy Lifting.”The cloud let its users focus on delivering differentiating business value instead of wasting valuable resources on the undifferentiated heavy lifting that makes up most of IT infrastructure. Over time Amazon has invested over $2B in developing technologies that could deliver security, reliability and performance at tremendous scale and at low cost. Our teams have created a culture of operational excellence that power some of the world’s largest distributed systems. All of this expertise is instantly available to customers through the AWS services.

Of course, Origami doesn’t really argue that our product is better because it’s in the cloud. Sure, we do derive the above benefits from being in the cloud.

But we’re winning because Origami is just a better product.