Cloud Today is Just Capacity On-Demand

We won’t have true cloud computing until we have a services-based infrastructure and standardization of cloud management frameworks.

We may call it “cloud” today, but what we really have with the offerings today is “capacity on demand.” We don’t actually have all the pieces necessary to execute on the vision that is “cloud computing.”

We’ve almost completed server standardization through virtualization but we haven’t really begun to standardize network and infrastructure services. And we’re certainly nowhere near ready to standardize on the cloud and application frameworks that will enable a seamless Intercloud. The term “utility” has many meanings. One of them is an “economic term referring to the total satisfaction received from consuming a good or service.” The utility of cloud computingcompute on-demand services today is fairly middling on the “W00T” scale from an enterprise consumer perspective.

On a scale of 1 to 10 I’d say we’re at about 3 today. We’re at compute resources as a service, at capacity on demand, but we’re not at infrastructure as a service. We’re not even really close yet.