the onda

Kevin Kelly's "The Technium" is quickly becoming one of my favorite blogs for following the sociology of technology and his latest post on cloud culture does not disappoint. In it, he argues for some of the shifting social and cultural norms that the shift a web-native centralized model for computing (read: the cloud) are bringing about. My favorite— his observation that one of the basic cultural dynamics of the cloud is that we'll become "more smarter:"

Clouds don't have to be smarter than the web we have now, but they are likely to be. The web can be thought of hyperlinked documents. The clouds can be thought of as hyper-linked data. Ultimately the chief reason to put things onto the cloud is to share their data deeply. Not just to have a convenient backup, or to have always on access, which the cloud WILL give, but to be able to weave together the data and interactivity of the parts, and thereby make all the pieces much smarter and more powerful than they could possibly be alone. It is not too much of an exaggeration to think of the cloud as the tool which allows us to share the elemental aspects of our data and activities in a way makes them smarter. The cloud is sort of a hivemind tool. (read the rest of the post)

Thinking about the platform shift from the perspective of the socio-cultural norms that will change with it moves us away from the geeky details of the browser-as-rich-runtime, 3G/4G/5G, and centralizing workloads at huge datacenters to the real game-changing opportunities that will come from threading everyone's activities and data into a natively interoperable set of 24x7 processes that can run semi-autonomously and reach their tentacles into ever-smarter and more portable access devices.

Now that is interesting.

Or certainly more interesting than the future I saw this week at CCA 08, a small conference on the emerging cloud computing architectures and their practical applications. Limited to about 70 folks from academia and business, the two day event convinced me of how early we are in this game— forget analogies about baseball and innings— we don't even seem to have gotten the players on to the field. Other than Amazon and Facebook and a handful of small open source projects, most of the rest of us still seem stuck in trying to bring our old and comfortable 3-tier applications into someone else's datacenter in an effort to cut costs and circumvent half-competent IT departments.

Sure we need cloud portability, sure the security story sucks right now. It'd be great to have better metrics for understanding the cost/cloud unit and I'm sure eventually we'll figure out whether it is 53% or 81% utilization that makes for the break-even point for building your own clusters.

These things seem to be implementation details to me however, and in the meanwhile it's good to see Kelly trying to provide us with some of that "vision thing."