WHAT COMES NEXT: THE PAD, THE CLOUD, AND THE SOFTWARE THAT LINKS IT ALL

It is the Tale, not He who tells it. - Stephen King "Breathing Method"

Part 2. The Cloud

I love cloud computing, and I've found it to be a real blessing to anyone who may have lots of ideas but doesn't have a lot of money. It's also an untold blessing to anyone with a phobia for filling out hardware and rack space purchase orders. Before we dive into the wonders of the cloud, I have to add a bit more of a cautionary tale, from Stephen King again:

"There is nothing there, in the dark, that isn't there in the light..."

I'm often asked questions like: "I think the 'cloud' is cool ... Can we make a cloud-based software offering?" The answer is "of course," but this is where King kicks in -- there's nothing intrinsic to a "cloud offering" that adds value -- a lame offering will still be lame in exactly the same ways when you put it on the cloud! The key to the cloud (as the key to horror fiction) lies in the invention of things in the dark that could never exist in the light. Now THAT is worth talking about.

I've closely followed some cloud-based offerings in the past few years -- Sales Sonar at Chemidex, and a sample online application that I'll include here just for contrast. These two examples highlight just what the cloud can and cannot do.

Chemidex describes Sales Sonar as revolutionary, and I believe that assessment is justified. With Sales Sonar the cloud is used to link companies, products, buyers and sellers - with terrific graphics and the kind of analytics that only the cloud can provide. Sales Sonar is remarkable because it builds a community, and it was designed to build it better because of "the cloud."

Our contrast application fits in another camp. It's possible to build a nice application, but without differentiation the cloud doesn't add much sparkle. Putting an indistinct app on the cloud doesn't provide anything more than an indistinct app. That's the rule here: if your application isn't fundamentally different because of what it gets from the cloud, then you wasted your time putting it there.

So, what can the cloud provide? The magic does not lie in the parts: practically all the components you find used for cloud apps (e.g. Xen, Linux, MySQL, NoSQL, nginx, Passenger, Ruby, Rails, etc...) run fine and offer the same benefits in a cloudless world. Here it really is ...The tale, not he who tells it. Suppose you have an application ready for pilot, but it'll take 100 servers to run. Here the cloud can come to your rescue -- spin up the app on AWS on 100 servers over a long weekend, and your life-changing pilot will come in at under $1000. Try comparing that to the cost of renting data center space for 100 servers, buying or leasing all the computer and network hardware, setting it all up, running the test, and then tearing it all down again in a long weekend.

"You see this? This is this. This ain't somethin' else. This is this!" Robert DeNiro "The Deer Hunter"

What makes the cloud magical is its flexibility -- and when combined with web standards and tools and modern development practices, it's possible to "solve" the IT equation -- specific rich solutions generated quickly and reliably, and built from standard parts that are familiar to any IT shop. That's where Pikasoft is headed, but to understand the rest of the puzzle, you have to understand the current state of software.

So up next ... software for the new millenium