The Context-Aware Cloud
Published Dec 02, 2008
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Yes, that does clarify your position wonderfully. I think, in many ways, we are talking about the same thing, I'm just coming at it from using services on an ADC/hardware to build that awareness into the fabric (and not being clear enough, apparently).
You said: "the magic's in the platform that provisions, orchestrates and delivers"
Absolutely. Without the provisioning and orchestration, none of this is possible. That's external to the "stuff" that is being provisioned and orchestrated, and can certainly include a mixture of hardware and software solutions for optimizing, accelerating, and securing applications residing within the cloud. Could be hardware, could be software, could be hardware images in a virtual machine. The abstraction is important (the customer shouldn't care) as is the ability to orchestrate/provision on demand.
There's an entire software industry waiting to grow out of the cloud data center provisioning and orchestration need, just as BPM grew out of a need to orchestrate business processes. But whether that will happen or not is largely dependent on how interconnected clouds from disparate providers will be.
But I digress into other areas...
Thanks for clarifying. That was much easier than via twitter. ;-)
Lori