Cloud Computing Info

InformationWeek has a good article, Behind The Storage Cloud. This article gives something of the plumbing behind the available storage in the cloud. Something they didn’t talk about in that article are the limitations I have been running into using the cloud.

For infrastructure providers like Google or Force.com, who are offering a PaaS (Platform as a Service), the storage is built into the application. If you chose them to develop your application, that works out fine. However, if you are looking for archiving or storage scaling (grow storage as you need it), it’s not so good.

Amazon offers a different kind of storage.

Yesterday, I wrote about 5 Reasons to avoid Cloud Computing. Today I am turning that around.

1. Scalability – Scalability is *THE* marketing buzz for cloud computing. To be able to dynamically add storage and computing power as needed, is a huge benefit to any business that needs scalability. Take note of that, not all businesses need that kind of scalability. If you are not presenting a web presence with a likelihood of viral acceptance, you probably don’t need this kind of scalability.
2. Time to market – This is goodness for any business.

I will follow this post with a “5 Reasons to embrace Cloud Computing”. I am actually very pro-cloud computing. I think it is the next big thing.

But, and there is always a but, there are reasons to avoid it right now.

1. It’s immature – we don’t really know who the long term players will be. We can guess on MS, IBM, Google, Amazon. What about Mosso, GoGrid, Elastra, Rightscale and any of a dozen others. The market needs to mature and play out for a while.
2. Security – is the cloud secure? I think it is actually.