I was on a panel at Enterprise 2.0 yesterday about “Cloud Computing” providers and wanted to take the entire definite of “what is cloud computing?” from a different perspective.
As a consumer, I fundamentally want the entire technology stack for an application to
- Just work
- Just scale
- Just tell me everything
Just works means that I tell an infrastructure that I want my application to have user experience X 99.99% of the time to 99.99% of the my users, and what I want back from that query is a dollar amount. I’ll then make a decision about what I can afford.
Just scales means that I can go from zero to millions of users, one geographical site to twenty geographical sites, and one continent to four continents without a rewrite/rearchitecting.
Just tells me everything means that an API and data source is not only about provisioning machine images or the like, it can be queried for real time and time series data about everything. It let’s me make decisions around latencies and nothing ever just happened for no reason.
When you think about what it would take for these things to come to fruition, it starts to feel like a real step forward in the industry. It’s the collection of these things (in existence or development) that I don’t mind giving a new term to.
Jason A. Hoffman 
4 responses to “What I would want a “cloud” to do for me: a functional view”
Hey Jason
I few questions but first, awesome to read your post. It’s been way too long 🙂
1. What’s going on with BingoDisk. About 2 years ago I recall it being announced that it would be phased out and replaced with something much better. Is that still in the works?
2. Any new updates on the Panel. Still in works or not … it’s been a few years.
3. Does Joyents infrastructure dynamically scales horizontally and vertically as described above right now automatically?
Thanks!
1) Bingodisk is currently being maintained and we’ll have some positive announcements about it in the future
2) Yes very much in the works and soon soon
3) Yes we do automatically burst vertically for people today, and with the appearance of #2 will help them define policies for horizontal scale.
[…] Blog Joyent | What I would want a “cloud” to do for me: a functional view Quote: "As a consumer, I fundamentally want the entire technology stack for an application to: 1. Just work 2. Just scale 3. Just tell me everything." Good summary of what we should be aiming for. (categories: cloud scaling ondemand ) […]
I usually don’t post on Blogs but ya forced me to, great info.. excellent! … I’ll add a backlink and bookmark your site.
I’m Out! 🙂