A little over a year ago Joyent was identified in a Forrester report as one of ten “Cloud Computing” companies to watch. The report was really the beginning of “Cloud Computing” being applied to those of us doing infrastructure and I think marks the point in time when the term really began to appear in marketing materials.
Our inclusion on that list was notable because we were the only privately held company on the list that operates their own server farms and develops their own software stack to instantiate and manage it all.
Since then it’s been cloud cloud cloud cloud cloud cloud cloud cloud and I recall the first time I noticed it showing up as an adjective, I overheard someone actually ask “Is your application cloudy yet?”.
Does one really want a “cloudy” application?
Our premise here has always been that an application should “Just Work” and when it does not, then we should have the means to quickly figure out why and correct it. Importantly, one should be able to figure out the issue(s) within the context of the entire architecture.
The general “gut feeling” though is that something is changing in our industry, and I would say that like how “the network” was flattened, standardized and made into a utility, what people are talking about as cloud computing is the next wave of making data and compute available as utilities or even if entirely owned, one conceptualizes and runs it as a utility. Well that’s part of it. For now, we’re all just calling it Cloud Computing.
Like anything that is a utility, there are initial concerns that fundamentally boil down to trust.
Trust does not emerge from things that are cloudy (opaque). It emerges from complete transparency and the ability to determine what’s is happening or has happened. Trust comes from letting an infrastructure know what’s important to you. I want to query an infrastructure with “This application needs to be available within 1 second to 99.99% of my users 99.99% of the time. How much is that and can you do it?” or perhaps “This 246GB of data you’re about to handle is ‘level 3’ data in our privacy policies. How much is that and can you do it?”.
The hallmark of this “Cloud Computing” needs to be complete transparency, instrumentability and while making it certain that applications just work, the interesting aspects of future APIs aren’t provisioning and self-management of machine images, it’s about stating policies and being able to make decisions that matter to my business.
Jason A. Hoffman 
One response to “Cloud Computing is actually Transparent Computing: there’s shouldn’t be anything cloudy about it”
[…] is doing and whether it has the capacity to accomplish what a customer needs it to. In a previous post, I said The hallmark of this “Cloud Computing” needs to be complete transparency, […]