Cheesy title? yes….

Every now and then; I end up either being part of a “Cloud” discussion or hear people talk about the “Cloud”… interestingly, majority of these people do not know that the “cloud” is not new… its old., yup., its not a new concept., and if you are a techie, you will know what I mean when I say “The cloud has been there for YEARS!!!”… but if you are hung up on marketing and sales, google around and see the true history of what the cloud is made up of…..,  

So why today? why is the cloud “new” today? any why the “Cloud”… well., Ill take a cheap shot and say that these terms., “Saas, Paas, Iaas…. -aas” got boring….. but what I will follow that cheap shot up with is that.. its not entirely true… there is something that the “cloud” brings… and that is “encapsulation”.

From wikipedia

So what “cloud” does provide is the delivery of “computing” as a service., and computing., encapsulates everything..

The Cloud is just the beginning in a shift in paradigm in how we expect to do things; several years ago, I wanted a “light weight LCD with a built in wifi chip and a minimal processor that allowed remote view”… why? well…. If i had this, i could have a very powerful server, somewhere in the garage, running 4-5 virtual machines and I could give everyone in my house a wireless LCD that connected to these VM’s….  so this was back in the early 2000’s…. far far far away from the iPads and googls chrome books… but this base idea was not original… I simply extended the offering of Motorola’s tough book offering which came with a wifi tough screen (that paired to the tough book).. This would allow users to leave the base in the car and walk around with a rugged LCD (touch screen)….  so… if you go back to the extension… that I was hopeful for… you end up with what the cloud can offer.

Imagine a time where you no longer needed to purchase a “fast processor” or needed to waste desktop space on desktop hardware… take it to the next level, imagine enterprise’s where you do not have to rely on IT to make sure they have the staff and experience to cover your needs, perform upgrades…. Its a shame that some of us still run windows XP on our brand new laptops, or have to use Microsoft Office 2003 today!

The cloud is all around us; Google being one of the most obvious cloud initiatives with their offerings, and other offerings such as prezi, dropbox, confluence, salesforce, rackspace, amazon, zoho…. and so on… the future of all these efforts will be cloud api’s and how we enhance and extend the offerability to a larger audience…