What cloud boils down to for the enterprise

For over five years, I have been writing about the convergence of data center, Internet and software-development technologies that has become known as cloud computing. I started writing on my personal blog in December 2006, then went on to write CNETs The Wisdom of Clouds for the last three years.

Ive also spent the last three years helping develop Ciscos cloud strategy, and am just about to begin an adventure as vice president of product strategy for enterprise cloud management vendor enStratus.

Now, as I find myself honored with the opportunity to contribute regularly to GigaOMs cloud coverage, I find myself thinking a lot about what Ive learned in those five years. So, for my first postand in an attempt to put some shape to my model of cloud computingI thought Id walk through my most-important observations to date. At worst, if I get it wrong, I hope youll straighten me out.

The cornerstone of everything I believe about the cloud can be summarized in one simple statement:

Cloud computing is an application-centric operations model.

What in the world does that mean? Well, lets begin with the cloud is an operations model part. I wrote a post that describes this concept in detail a couple of years ago.

The operations model is one that has been discussed ad nauseum in the last couple of years, but as a quick recap, it centers on delivery of IT capabilities at scale, on demand, typically in a multi-tenant environment. It is important to understand that, while new technologies are indeed being developed for cloud, these technologies are be! ing deve loped to fit the operations model, not the other way around.

The application-centric part of that statement is derived from the very nature of cloud itself. Traditionally, IT operations has been a server-centic affair:

We buy a server
We assign that server an IP address and wire it to a switch port
We choose an operating system (which, I argue, is actually part of the server from an operations perspective), then install applications
Finally, we monitor the health of the system based onwait for itserver metrics: CPU and memory utilization, I/O rates, etc.

Now, think about consuming a public cloud service. If you dont own the infrastructure you are consuming, you dont own the server. You may own the operating system if you are using an infrastructure service, such as Amazons EC2, but for most cloud services, you wont even have that luxury.

What you do bring to the tableer, serviceis code, data, configuration metadata and/or policies that are, in fact, what makes any cloud service valuable to you as an individual or an organization. Your task in consuming a cloud service is to deliver those elements to a service that turns them into functionality that drives business value.

Thus, a new order of operations hasto evolve in order to meet the demands of this new model. The diagram below, borrowed from my first post on the topic of clouds effects on operations, is how I see that order breaking down. Read that post to get a sense of what responsibility is assigned to each of these roles.

In coming posts, I ! want to dig deep into the consequences of application-centricity in cloud, and in enterprise IT, in general. There are so many interesting corollaries, exceptions and possibilities that Im looking forward to a long conversation with you, GigaOMs readers. Please do not hesitate to give me feedback via comments. I can also be found on Twitter at @jamesurquhart.

Image courtesy of Gary Orenstein.

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