Cloud OSWe hear about the ‘Cloud’ at every turn lately, but the cloud has been coming for a long time, in many varied ways.  The well known players are all household names: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Sun and more; but their ideas are closer than they would like to admit: offer reliable development platforms, with elastic storage services, to anyone who wants to write an application.  I know, I might have over simplified that a bit, but not by much.

These companies are pursuing the cloud with speed and force.  I want to list just a couple  interesting bits:

1. Amazon has finally offered us a real service level agreement on their AWS platform, which means that IT shops all around the world can move forward with test development.   Amazon is also touting that they have 29 billion objects stored in their system, that number is tiny in comparison to what we will see in only a few years time.

2. Google recently announced that all Gmail accounts can be used as OpenID credentials as well, which means that your Gmail user name and password can now sign you into a huge number of sites across the Internet.  Add that to the Google App Engine, and we can see that they are making a case for Google being the cloud of choice.  The Google App Engine allows companies to build applications that run inside the Google infrastructure, and those applications take advantage of the Google Datastore.  The Datastore is a massive, persistent, and powerful structure for storing almost any type of data.  Historical facts, e-commerce transactions, contacts, links to video, images or any other type of object can be stored in the Datastore, but, the most important fact is that on the Google infrastructure you gain redundancy.  Redundancy, as in unless Google disappears, your information will never be lost to the sands.  Sure, it might be orphaned, but it will exist.

These efforts alone are amazing technological advances, and more are on the near-term horizon, but we will see huge dividends when the platforms open up, and allow for a cross-pollenization between a multitude of systems.  Salesforce.com and Facebook are beginning that even now with the announcement that they have teamed to offer Force.com for Facebook.  This new service allows third-party developers to write applications on the Force.com platform and then let the 120 million users of Facebook use that application.  Salesforce.com gains a huge win here too, just think of all of those developers from the Facebook system who will now be ale to write applications for the Salesforce.com user base.

Perhaps the real power will come when you can quickly author an application on one of the platforms in the Cloud, and know that all of the platforms can run that same code on their system; allowing users everywhere to take advantage of your service.  We will see a rush to take most applications into the Cloud, especially as the users, all of us, gain more access to the Cloud on a daily basis.  From our smartphones, with apps and the mobile web, to the laptop using Wi-Max allowing our powerful laptops to be connected to the Internet no matter where we are, we are moving into the Cloud now too.

Links of note:

Matt Williamson
twitter.com/mattwilliamson