It's Real my friend ....

When industry stalwarts like IBM, Microsoft and others talked about Cloud computing a couple years ago, it caught everybody's attention. Then we heard Free software advocates downplaying the whole idea of cloud. I read Richard Stallman - creator of GNU stating cloud as another trap to lock into proprietary systems in an interview with Guardian in Sept 2008. I am a big fan of GNU tools and I respect his point of views, but I was not convinced with his idea of "keeping information in your own hand". We (individuals and businesses) kept information in our own hands for a long time and later realized that these information provide no values until acted upon, shared and analyzed. In other words, internet really enabled us to use the information and make money from it.  Larry Ellison in Oracle World 2009 spoke about cloud and said "computer industry is more fashion-driven than women's fashion and cloud computing is simply the latest fashion."  


It is important to know that Cloud computing is not a new fashion concept, in fact the term dates back to 1960 when John Mccarthy an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist who received the Turing Award in 1971 said that  "computation may someday be organized as a public utility". In fact, Marc Andreessen, was one of the first to attempt to commercialize cloud computing with an Infrastructure as a Service model with his company Loudcloud. It later sold the infrastructure business to EDS in 2002 and became Opsware which was acquired by HP in July 2007 for $1.6 billion. 
As an Infrastructure architect, I understand the relevance and benefits of cloud computing and I think, even if its a new name for some  of the existing distributed computing technologies, every business small, medium or large are looking at ways to reduce cost using cloud computing technologies. Here are some facts:

• Amazon EC2 saw the unprecedented growth in public and private cloud. Guy Rosen tracks the growth of EC2 take a look at the stunning data about EC2 here. 
• EC2 runs IBM Technologies now.
• IBM is offering CloudBurst 

Comments/suggestions are welcome.