Media Dojo

On Tuesday 31 March, I spent the day at Cloud Computing Expo at the Cloud Boot Camp run by Alan Williamson from AW2.0 from the UK. I did the entire day-long session because Alan is an independent systems integrator for cloud computing. TRANSLATION: he knows where the bodies are buried among the vendors landscapes.

Cloud computing isn’t the panacea that many are trying to foist onto media and marketing firms. In fact, there are certain applications in which loading them onto the cloud isn’t what you want. At the same time, shrewd buyers can achieve some stonking economies vis a vis their competitors by using the best parts of the current cloud infrastructure offers from the likes of Amazon, Google, GoGrid, Mosso and so forth. Media and marketing people need to start getting used to those names because they’ll start cropping up in strategy sessions.

Aside from a mind-numbing arrary of stats, war stories, insights, and customer horror/success stories, the main aspect I took away from Alan’s seminar is how we remain inside a 1994 mind set as it applies to cloud computing. Most everyone has an idea of the constituent parts of of the cloud, the main bottlenecks, and what to attack next. There is also a slew of narratives trying to capture the “essence” of cloud computing in some grand theory. The upshot is that there’s a lot of white space in the middle. Grand theories of how cloud computing will “change everything” jostle for position aside “how do I port my SQL database onto Amazon S3?” In other words, everyone knows that cloud computing could be hugely important, on par with Internet. At the same time, no one knows how all these constituent parts will fit together, who will make obscene money, who will survive but be different, and who’s toast.

Call me biased, but I start with the plumbing because all models leak eventually. Cloud computing will be no different. Alan’s take is unabashedly technical, with plenty of pointers to the good, the bad and the ugly.

Take a look at the posted slides at

http://www.aw20.co.uk/help/

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