Where are we going with cloud concepts?
We are getting ahead of ourselves again with technology concepts that bring old ideas back as if they were new. The reason why SOA was such a great concept is because it is an approach to a problem not an all encompassing solution to everything. I am not a developer and I really have no interest in trying to learn programming and that within itself is a weakness when it comes to SOA. The community is heavy on concepts of development by developers for developers. I know what the books say but I have been involved with SOA long enough to know what it is all about. So, this is directly related to cloud computing because cloud adds more than just code, method and process. IBM has spent a lot of money driving the idea of the cloud. Microsoft has spent a lot of money on this as well. We can go on and on with vendors who are driving the cloud. What has happened now is that people in commercial industry and the DoD have picked up on some of the ideas behind cloud computing and they are running with it. From my perspective it is like handing a toddler scissors. The federal CIO recently came out with a 25 point paper on information technology reform (http://cio.gov/documents/25-Point-Implementation-Plan-to-Reform-Federal%20IT.pdf ). After reading this paper I felt that the federal CIO is throwing a technical dart at the wall. This is a symptom of a greater problem. I am not against cloud computing but I don’t think that the federal government knows what it means. I don’t think the vendors are finished making up what it means. The result from my perspective is going to be SOA like. We are going to have cloud certified experts that tell us how to make clouds, smoke clouds etc. We are going to have rain clouds, and nimbus stacks and all sorts of neat fun marketing concepts. The problem is that we are in financial distress as a country and our government needs to save money not spend it. We need to focus on data center consolidation, leaning out virtualization so that it makes sense using the DISA decks. We need to focus on process and methods and creating best practice to share with our communities. We need open source best practice. We need to focus on people, process, methods and tools. Cloud concepts make sense in abstract but since there is nothing official on what cloud really is how could we make solid decisions on soluble concepts?