Cloud computing: Climbing the Peak of Inflated Expectations?

As with any new technology trigger, Cloud Computing seems to be moving uphill on the Peak of Inflated Expectations and could potentially be adopted in mainstream computing in the next 2 to 5 years, provided it crosses the chasm – the Gartner ‘Trough of Disillusionment’.  Refer to the latest Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies – July 2008. Look at the Google insight graph to see the exponential rise in interest for the term ‘Cloud Computing’.

Everyone from Dell to HP to Yahoo is trying to catch the bandwagon. IBM, Microsoft and VMWare are vying for the Cloud Computing Market but by far the leader is Amazon with their EC2 and S3 Offering and also right behind them is Google with their AppEngine. Somewhere in between are raring to go and upbeat startups like Rightscale, Gigaspaces, 3Tera, Joyent (many more see here); Opensource folks such as Enomalism, Eucalyptus and so many others trying to catch the bandwagon with their ‘Cloud Computing’ offerings.

Well, the best part about clouds in general is whatever shape or size it is, its still a cloud as long as it has the following simple properties: well rounded edges (in computing jargon this translates into usable interfaces and integratable), mobility (application and server mobility, virtualization), seamless (you don’t know where your application resides and which physical resource it uses), may or may not cause rain/hails (breakdowns, failures, availability issues), overencompasses anything and everything that it can (every possible software that can go SaaS could get clouded), usually found on higher altitudes (target is higher layers of OS stack – applications, session and presentation layers, higher levels of abstraction using tools such as Ruby-on-Rails, Python or totally new languages which operate at much higher level than C/C++/Java).

Will Cloud Computing transfort IT? Well, only time and customers will tell.