Wednesday, December 08, 2010

Cloud 2.0? Give me a break!

Over 4 years ago a group of analysts and vendors got together to try and rally around the term SOA 2.0. In an attempt to stop that in its tracks, I said a few things that maybe played a smaller part in helping to show the problems behind the term. I haven't seen or heard of SOA 2.0 much since, so maybe the community effort helped to bring a little sense to the world.

Unfortunately it seems that adding 2.0 to something is still a favourite pastime for those that either can't figure out a good name, or simply don't understand why it works for Web 2.0. With today's announcement that Salesforce have bought Heroku, it seems that we've entered the world of 'Cloud 2'! Oh come on! Let's inject some reality into this again, before it gets jumped on by other vendors or analysts that believe an increment to a term really makes a difference when the technology or architecture hasn't actually evolved.

Apparently Cloud 2 is oriented around social, mobile and real-time. So is this hard real-time, soft real-time, or some other form of real-time, given that when you're using applications in the Cloud today the response is happening in your frame of reference and within your lifetime!

I do believe that the current perception of Cloud is limited to servers and that does need to change, but that can be sorted out by having a true architectural definition of Cloud that is agreed by everyone. But there's no need to call it Cloud 2. In fact that just adds more confusion!

And social aspects of Cloud? Well I'm not a big fan of social networks; I think they're anti-social: go down the pub to see your friends, don't chat to them on IRC!

So let's get a grip on reality! Sticking 2 on the end in the hopes that it'll help will only do the opposite. And as I said for SOA 2.0, if this "social, real-time and mobile" Cloud really is different than what we're getting used to today, then coin a proper term for it, e.g., The Social Cloud.

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