Above the Clouds
February 17th, 2009
The Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Lab at UC Berkeley recently released a paper titled Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing discussing the current state of cloud computing and the challenges ahead.
I really liked that they set a base level and defined what their understanding of cloud computing is, which vendors there are, and that they cover a broad level of publicly available cloud providers. It seems that IBM is not really on their radar as a public cloud provider – the study was not covering private clouds and focusing on providers providing services available without contract negotiations with the vendor – which is a bit surprising given that with IBM as an affiliate member of the lab I would’ve thought that information about our cloud efforts would’ve been available and might have been an interesting addition to the paper.
Covering more about cloud APIs might have also been a great addition. They emphasized the problems of proprietary APIs on clouds because of vendor lock-in, but discussions about potential standards in cloud APIs or middleware were not covered.
Nonetheless I really recommend reading this paper if you consider using cloud computing for business applications to get an understanding of what cloud computing is and what the scenarios are where it can provide advantages today.
If you’re interested in further details and discussions about this paper you might also want to look at the Above the Clouds Blog.