Monday, April 14, 2008

There's been a ton of commotion recently with everyone getting excited about Google's App Engine and Amazon's EC2. Rackspace has been getting into the mix as well with Mosso. It's pretty exciting stuff, and has the potential to take a significant market share from the more traditional hosting models (shared, dedicated, managed, etc...).

Lew Moorman (from Rackspace) argues that there will always be a place for the other models. I actually think that he's right in the short to medium term, but fundamentally, computing power has become a commodity. It's getting to the point where individuals and forward thinking organizations are abstracting the details of hosting their applications away from themselves, in effect reducing the level of system administration knowledge that they will have to keep on staff. Like it or not, that's not going to stop.

Programming language evolution is a perfect example of how this abstraction moves certain technical knowledge domains out of the mainstream and back into being a speciality. How many programmers do you know that actually use any sort of assembly language programming in their work today? I'll assume not many. Instead, programming has been abstracted away from the hardware and into the domain of solving user problems.

Looking at the hosting market as it stands today, we are going to see some serious change over the next decade (if not sooner). Today, many companies are outsourcing the server and network administration work to an ever decreasing number of service providers (isn't consolidation fun?). This is the same principle as the programming example: companies are abstracting the detailed infrastructure work away from their staff. But in many ways, it isn't really abstract as much as the executive suite would like to think. Most enterprises still outsource in "server units" or "network device units", ensuring that they have to think in terms of physical or logical servers.

Now look at "cloud hosting". It's another abstraction layer for application infrastructure, outsourcing most of the challenges of the physical systems completely to the providers.

So here's where it's going... if cloud hosting providers can solve a couple of key problems, then they are in a position to help enterprise buyers move to this new model. Issue number 1? Security. In this world of industry competition, government regulation and consumer data protection concerns, this is of paramount concern to enterprise buyers - which is why it should matter to cloud hosting companies. These hosting companies should start to have a dialog with their various technology partners and potential customers about the following topics: Data Privacy, Authentication, Authorization, Logical "Tier-ed" Separation of Application Layers, Private Network Transport. The sooner this conversation starts, the sooner the problems can be solved.

NOTE: This posting talks about the hosting business... which my employer is actively involved in. The ideas expressed above are my own, and have absolutely nothing to do with the company I work for.

Labels: cloud computing, hosting, virtualization