Thursday, December 13, 2007

"The techno-utility complex" and cloud lock-in

OK, so in the process of commenting on Nick Carr's post, "The techno-utility complex", I came up with a term I like: cloud lock-in. This goes to my earlier conversation about vendor lock-in in the capacity on demand world--aka cloud computing. I like the term because it reinforces the truth: there is no single compute cloud, and the early leaders in the space don't want there to be one. Rather, they are hell bent on collecting your dimes every hour, and making it damn expensive for you to move your revenue stream elsewhere.

My advice stands: if you are greenfield, and data security and access are less of an issue for you, go for EC2, the managed hosting "cloud bank", or the coming offerings from Google or Microsoft. However, if you want to take a more conservative approach towards gaining the economic benefits of utility computing, make your own cloud first.

1 comment:

swardley said...

Totally agree with you ... at lot of these concepts we faced with Zimki. I have a video of my Oscon talk which covered most of this, if useful.

What you really want is a competitive utility market with portability (patration or fluidity or fungitility - gasp did I really use that word!) which means open standards, formats and most importantly open source implementations of those standards.

Anyway, hope this helps - you're making some very good points. There are some real pitfalls out there and it is good that people like you, Rich and others are raising this stuff.