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Is cloud technology cyclical and something that has an end of life in technology?
I have heard that in the 70's there was a cloud offering through IBM called time share, allowing people to buy time on main frames to store info and data. Through the cloud technology, the cost of ownership and cost of services goes down, but when using cloud you will eventually have to increase your bandwidth to support more and more cloud services, which is more expensive and that cost will rise. There is also no QOS with the public internet and most people like to have control of their own data and this is just a reaction to the down economy. Is this technology just a phase and not a long term sustainable solution for the long term? Is it possible to get QOS on the public internet? You can prioritize to the door but once you are on there is no QOS. Is this feasible?
Best Answer
- Recommended by:
- Chad Massaker
QOS is a tiered cost model. There are IP bits that can determine how quickly you packets arrive. Cloud computing is an extension of time-sharing and the Internet. It is not a whim technology. It is a forward facing one.
- Recommended by:
- Cindy Larsen
Chad and the others make good points...
I believe your questions are simple:
Is cloud computing cyclical?...Yes, as all technology has cycles and changes that will affect the buying and utilization of it. However, it has been here and will stay ad infinitum. The "clouds" biggest challenges as Chad referred to above is the networks quality, bandwidth availability and security scrutiny. As these improve...and they will, all things "to the cloud" (as MS likes to state) will go. i would argue the cost will not go up, but down, as the competition fights for this spaces and adds, more robust hosted services and unified communications to their portfolios.
End of Life?? Yes and No. This will be determined by providers continuous (or lack of) improvement and new product availability more than anything else. Again this is where the choice of selecting a well funded, tenured, quality conscious and R&D minded partner becomes difficult.
In the retail sector we increasingly go to retail parks both phisically and on line; We rely on service providers for our utilities, council services, even down to farming, post and the milkman.
If the roads have traffic jams, or the tills queues, or the utilities start to cost to much we switch supplier.
I can't see us switching back to inhouse production & services when a multitude of alternate cloud vendors exist.
I can though see us having trusted brands information/service providers such as Google, Amazon etc. And agile cheaper alternatives for new ventures. So clouds will form into different levels. Cumulus for the mainstream and Altostratus for the niche high value offerings.
And i can also also imagine that sometimes private QOS feeds from these providers e.g. (shares & news) will be worthwhile for some financial companies where time and money are clearly linked. I guess these will be lightening feeds ;-)
The IBM analogy does not reflect the technology reality of today.
a) Development tools continue to facilitate rapid application development but a lot of the "debris" from that development has been cleaned up making applications lighter, smaller, faster. The same size "pipe" will deliver more applications in 10 years than it does now. This analogy does not play out in road, or plumbing or other kinds of social infrastructure becasue the units being moved remain primarily static in size.
b) Bandwidth is going up - that is a fact and with IPV6 and other technologies available to manage peripheral bandwith constraints around addressing, etc. there is not a structural limitation. Market forces will address the spike in demand - higher prices will occur and new entrants and offerings will come in bringing a new wave of commoditization driving prices down.
Longer term concern is that cloud computing will follow the path of telephony where commoditization of services and pricing models will drive the need for significant economies of scale, driving a major M&A period, possibly inhibiting innovation and leaving us with 2-4 players to select key services from. We have seen this in the telco, wireless carriers and even enterprise software, frequently not to the benefit of the consumer. The hope is that the innovation that cloud enables will be fiscally sustainable throughout the lifecycle of the technology.
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I'm not sure what you're trying to ask here. It sounds like you're asking if the cloud life cycle is tied to Net Neutrality (QOS)?
I don't know that you can apply a traditional "technology life cycle" to The Cloud, which to me, is less about technology and more about being a platform from which to deliver services. Possibly also a methodology or strategy. After all, at the end of the day, it's still just a bunch of servers (virtual or otherwise) with beefy internet connections serving up information to end users. It's where those servers are, who manages them, etc. that defines it as cloud.
Check out this quote from Ray Ozzie's Blog: Dawn of a New Day:
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Continuous services are websites and cloud-based agents that we can rely on for more and more of what we do. On the back end, they possess attributes enabled by our newfound world of cloud computing: They’re always-available and are capable of unbounded scale. They’re constantly assimilating & analyzing data from both our real and online worlds. They’re constantly being refined & improved based on what works, and what doesn’t. By bringing us all together in new ways, they constantly reshape the social fabric underlying our society, organizations and lives. From news & entertainment, to transportation, to commerce, to customer service, we and our businesses and governments are being transformed by this new world of services that we rely on to operate flawlessly, 7×24, behind the scenes.
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That said, bandwidth will certainly become an issue as adoption of the cloud becomes more wide spread. The T1 line, which used to cost $1000+.mo and was considered the default standard for business Internet connectivity, now runs less than $400/month and is considered the 56k of our time. We're in the process of moving all of our customers (and ourselves) over to higher bandwidth alternatives such as Metro-Ethernet or Business Class Cable.