Earlier tonight I spent some time at the Cloud Camp attached to the Interop 2009 event in Las Vegas. I’m a firm believer that a lot of the mobile solutions that are coming in the near future, whether they be applications or services will have some component with Cloud Computing.
There were folks from Intuit, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems talking about their Cloud Initiatives, but getting hard answers — people were skirting absolute facts and figures. While it’s still in a “green” technology where things are evolving, I feel that this is a ripe opportunity for mobile to be part of the conversation. Financial Services, Healthcare, Manufacturing, and Data Management Companies have all begun to weigh in. Mobile Operators continue to push advanced services outside the their walls and letting others such as Ericsson to manage growth, scale and support. It would seem inevitable for Mobile Operators to be involved, but unfortunately, absent.
The concept for mobile to take advantage of Cloud Computing is as follows: The application layer as well as the main data store in the cloud and deliver smaller objects to the mobile device with either a browser or thin client as for the presentation. The opportunity is to design for messaging and data delivery of potentially complex or compute intensive jobs with low latency and high compute cycles and deliver result sets to a high latency, constrained compute cycle device.
Some of the issues around cloud computing were raised during a few sessions were Standards, Legal Issues and Application Delivery. I spent more of my time in the Standards breakout session, so I will comment most on this topic. As all of this is still new, not a whole lot of standards are in place which present a range of issues, from Operational to Development to Security. One concern raised was the fact that the lack of adoption of cloud computing is performance metrics. It seems that we are reliving the nineties when IT Managers were evaluating datacenter uptime, reliability and core infrastructure to match their needs. Can the same methodology be created so that IT Managers can be confident and assured about certain performance metrics. In addition, policies about securing sensitive data against contamination, intrusion, and more. There are also some murky issues around how Cloud Computing resources are deployed and differentiated against hosted virtualization and how it is all optimized.
All of this might be less of an issue when it comes to supporting consumer applications and services in mobile, but when it comes to more critical applications such as billing, policy managers and even enterprise applications, the reluctance of trying Cloud Computing is similar to a mobile operator rapidly deploying new services — it just doesn’t happen quickly.
So once again, we may be doing a great job of hyping ideas that are slightly ahead of their time and possibly too forward thinking to implement in a large-scale and meaningful way.
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