There is apparently a lot of criticism those days against Cloud Computing. CC was named by some people as the the silver bullet for datacenters, providing more flexible service, lower costs, easier and faster setup. But it seems that it finally reached its highest point of hype. With experience, people start to see CC’s limits and to realize that it isn’t simply going to replace all DCs.
We first got a report from McKinsey: “Clearing the air on cloud computing” (relayed on Techcrunch and the NY times).
While CC is great for SME (startups for instance, like commentag), it compete hardly with big companies’ owned-datacenters. Using the cloud implies also adaption to specific application and security architecture, as well as organisational changes to leverage its flexibility. It is said that CC is only really economicaly viable for pre-paid linux systems.
The report makes also a comparison for moving a whole DC to AWS. I personnaly think that the authors got it wrong in their comparison here. As I said before, I think that Cloud Computing is good for on-demand computing units, but nobody is going to use it in place of a usual DC. Another point is that the report examine cost of migration to the cloud but what about getting out of the cloud?
A good point in the report is mentioning low SLA available (if any). That was also one of my concerns when I investigated AWS for commentag.
Finally, McKinsey’s report advises big companies to do virtualization in their own DC in place than CC and insists on standardization of services through whole company.
Here is also a white paper on cloud computing from Maya design. They believe in a P2P-based cloud and not in the vendors’ (AWS, Google, Microsoft) solutions. The white paper points out that clouds today are proprietary and not compatible between them, and warns about the risk of vendor lock-in.
Finally, I can also mention a discussion I had with a strategic business from Sun microsystems some time ago. As pointed by Maya Design, there is indeed the vendor lock-in and the difficulty of getting out of the cloud or migrating from one cloud to another. This can lead to many issues and, because of the migration, eventually higher costs in the end.
As a conclusion and based on my experience, I think that Cloud Computing is a great tool to answer specific needs; to help during traffic spikes for instance, or for a startup as the time to market is very short. But Cloud Computing is probably not going to replace the traditionnal Datacenter (at least not a external cloud). For big companies, I believe more in virtualization in the datacenter.
