Cloud Computing

I did not attend PDC this year so I'm blogging on the back of having streamed the Ray Ozzie keynote.

I feel sure I won't be the only person to wonder whether Cloud computing is likely to be a huge success for Microsoft. In theory, it makes a lot of sense, but in practice, I can't help wondering whether this is to a large extent another 'Hailstorm'-esque Microsoft dream. Will companies really be queuing up to have Microsoft data centres host their application code and corporate data? However wonderful the platform may turn out to be, what does it mean to pass responsibility for the safe keeping of your data with a third party like Microsoft?

Why do we need Cloud computing anyway? What does it do such that we cannot live without it? I mean, if we look at .NET and ask the same question, the answer seems obvious - we could not live without it and thank goodness the COM era came to an end. Anyone who uses a computer in the modern world reaps benefit from the technological innovation of .NET - will the same be true of a Microsoft cloud?

Well, I guess the cloud could provide unlimited scalability with that kind of horsepower packed into the huge data centre. But I wonder how many companies will actually need that kind of scalability? And doesn't scalability really boil down to writing code that can be scaled in the first place as opposed to taking any old bit of code and throwing more cores at it? I'm thinking of plentyoffish.com when I say this - one smart guy (Markus Frind), 2 databases, one web server and thousands of hits per day with a truly scalable piece of software. I'm pretty sure he doesn't need the cloud and I'm pretty sure he gets more hits than most companies who will sign up for the cloud.

Failover also has to be a consideration in any scalable application, but do we not already have web server farms and SQL Server clusters that keep the ecosphere of Microsoft applications more than available?

To a large extent, I think it's going to boil down to price. If Microsoft can host your code and data in their cloud at a significantly reduced cost to your business than you hosting it, then perhaps they're onto a winner. But even if they do manage to make the cloud financially competitive, the question still remains as to whether you trust Microsoft to be the caretakers of your company's greatest assets.