Is Cloud Computing just Provisioning?

There is more and more buzz on Cloud Computing (and, it just happens, that is why I've been too busy to blog lately ;-). However, one of the common assumptions that seems to be floating around is that Cloud Computing is nothing but a provisioning exercise. As an example (btw, an example of some pretty cool technology) is this reference to Cohesive Flexible Technologies which does some cool stuff with provisioning. Or, 3tera has a great demo for provisioning.

But provisioning is only a part of the story, and, in some ways, only the beginning of the story. There are several other key elements that make cloud computing ultimately more valuable in a business sense. For instance, virtualization is almost a requirement for great cloud computing. Several solutions are already based heavily on virtualization, but most provisioning solutions to date have been focused on deployments on physical hardware, with a few looking at deploying on virtual hardware. Why is virtualization important? Hmm, short answer is that it allows consolidation, migration, isolation, security, and several serviceability requirements than increase the overall value of the cloud. I may go into more depth on that in a future article because the benefits may not all be as visible on the surface.

Another part of the story is image managment, which today is less well evolved than it ultimately needs to be. I've mentioned rPath & rBuilder previously, Amazon provides views of images, but we are basically in that early stage of image management where the number of solutions and repositories tends to boggle the mind. This portion of cloud computing will need some additional standardization, improved tooling, better life cycle management, etc. and will be key to deploying solutions within clouds.

Management of the life cycle of applications or images (or virtual appliances, as some call them) within the cloud is also a challenging area in which there is very little product available today. For instance, people tend to deploy singletons or redundant sets of servers or images. But HA hasn't done a large merge yet with cloud computing. For instance, it should be possible to deploy a virtual appliance which "rarely fails" or "never fails" from a customer point of view. HA solutions can be crafted that way today, but usually they are hand tuned, hand configured. In a true cloud computing environment, that should be merely a parameter to the deployment.

Other aspects include handling things preventive maintenance - does your service go down whenever someone needs to install a new service pack or update the hardware? In a cloud environment, there should be other resources your application could use - so why not just migrate your application to those resources without disruption? Oh, but how do you handle migrating network connections, how do you handle access to the license server? Is someone collecting usage information for charge back? How is that usage information integrated across the cloud for charge back? How do you measure and manage your response times for multi-tiered applications?

I think all of these are aspects that will eventually be included in the expectations of things that a Cloud just handles. And, some of the services that a Cloud will soon offer will cover those bases and potentially many more. Clouds are much more than just provisioning.