I've had some discussions on the greenness of Cloud Computing the last few weeks. Most people consider the Cloud to be Green IT, but there are skeptics. Their main argument against the greenness of the Cloud is usually componentisation.
While the market is starting to get their grips on terminology and categorization of Cloud Computing, Gartner seem to be lost in their own world. Failing to separate Key characteristics, delivery models and deployment models and leveling the field into five attributes, Gartner tries to push us back to Ground Zero :(
Good blog-post from a quite interesting twitter-discussion on cloud technology.
I'm always shocked by comments like this:
Good blog-post on an old-trick:
Amazon CloudFront delivers your content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your objects are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance.
Microsoft, offers a way to host your .Net applications on the Cloud with a pricing model yet to be officially announced, and offers integration with some Microsoft services/applications.
Here are the three criteria I have for determining whether something is a cloud service or not:
That is - how can we expect IT people to be able to strategize and decide on IT direction and tactics if we can't even describe for them what the real issues are in any consistent way. For that, we need a commonly accepted definition, even if it is not great.
Cloud computing platforms offer many benefits including: