Cloud Philosophy and the Drivers…

I’m sorry, forgive me, but I will not go into the details of what cloud is, or Safaricom’s offerings,that you can Google. What I can say is that it’s awesome! To illustrate my point I will quote Stephen Bias, CTO of Cloudscaling:

“I think the IT of tomorrow is going to be a lot more application focused and a lot less infrastructure focused.

I am not sure people really want to except that, because in many ways it’s easy to let things remain as a status quo, but I mean, the disruption is so industry wide and you can — Amazon Web Services has turned into a billion dollar business in about five year’s time. That’s a huge wake up call. You don’t see those levels of growth very often. So something very fundamental is happening here.”

Venture Beat phrases it in this way:

A few years ago, when someone would store his photos on Picasa, he would say, “I am using this website to store my photos” or “I put my photos on the Internet.” Now he would say, “I store my photos in the cloud.” What’s the difference ? In most cases, none. In consumer language, the word “cloud” has replaced “Internet” or “web” — it is just more trendy!

And yet, something real is happening.

For decades, innovation in information technology has been driven by enterprises, government, and military needs. With the cloud wave, the place for innovation has changed, and it is now the consumer which is the driving force in IT.

The distribution of IT over many generic servers in a completely distributed architecture, where components can fail and be upgraded or changed individually without material impact on the whole system, thus reducing manual operations to a fraction of those required with traditional IT systems, is the foundation for the cloud wave.

This kind of infrastructure has revolutionized software development. Now instead of having to deal with infrastructure as a hindrance (because it is too slow or too expensive) developers can program the infrastructure to deliver exactly the amount of computing power, network resources or storage capacity that is required.

Cloud Computing is a new way of doing information technology, or as Bias puts it, “ I like to highlight that it’s the difference between building robotics factories for automobile manufacturing versus kind of having an assembly line for automobile manufacturing. It’s a fundamental transformation of the way that you actually build IT systems.”

It is a transition from enterprise computing, allowing you to connect even a mobile phone, to a data center full of thousands or tens of thousands of servers to do processing on in little and no time at all.

It is a complete change on the dynamics of  how we build  applications, how we consume them, and how the infrastructure underneath them that powers the applications works.