Last week when Twitter announced that they are building a datacenter I wrote a post wondering why companies move out of the cloud as they grow big. Even though I don’t have many examples of startups building their own datacenters after growing big, many folks in the startup world told me that they wouldn’t mind moving to their own DC if the situation demanded it. This justification can come from any company moving from the cloud to their own datacenter too. If every successful consumer focussed company is going to demand full control over network and system configuration and they want to be the person defining the SLAs, it is a big trouble for the public clouds. When consumer focussed companies are so obsessed with control and SLAs, there is no way enterprises are going to embrace public clouds anytime soon. Either we need a change in mindset of the companies in both the consumer space and the enterprise space or public cloud providers have to do more to lure them towards clouds.
Recently, Larry Dignan wrote this post on CNET about Autodesk using Amazon EC2 to do heavy simulations in the background for their Inventer 3-D design applications.
Grant Rochelle, director of digital simulation at Autodesk Manufacturing, says these tools will leverage Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the background. Engineers and designers are trying to ask key questions about their designs, notably whether they will bend or break and how they behave under certain conditions. “By designing Inventor into the cloud our users can consider many alternatives,” said Rochelle. “These compute simulations have been restricted on the desktop due to the hardware limitations.”
This is an example from the other side of the “cloud situation” I discussed in the previous post. Well established companies from even the desktop era are considering cloud to push some of their workloads. This is the most logical approach and many enterprises are already doing it. Along with test and development, they are also pushing other non-mission critical workloads that are beyond the reach of regulations.
I think cloud computing is at an interesting point where traditionally conservative enterprises are eager to explore but web 2.0 kids want to stay away. It is time we (evangelists, analysts, practitioners, etc.) should come together and think about it. Let us keep out the FUDs, spins and other noise from the discussions and explore why this is the case. What do you think?
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