By Daniel Field

Many are of the impression that cloud computing is a new phenomenon, invented the other side of the pond and which came as a surprise to the traditional Grid technologies research community.

This is simply not true. Cloud computing is the rebranded, well marketed natural evolution of the ideas that were already being discussed and predicted by the grid community before the cloud entered the radar and took the industry by storm. And before you all jump in with discussions on the technical nuances between the two, let me make clear that I’m talking about the service offered to the end user, ie, the value proposition, and the business model behind the idea.

Whilst the torrent of media attention for all things cloud has undoubtedly cast a shadow over the traditional grid areas, the market analysis of many of these projects anticipated the coming of the cloud, albeit not in its current shape or form.

Grid computing traditionally concentrated on the high performance aspect of parallel computing, and the popular examples given were reams of computers slogging away number crunching financial derivatives or modeling the structures of proteins. However, by 2006 many of the business analysts were already pointing at other aspects of the Grid, such as trust and security, distributed programs running in diverse locations and advanced service level agreement components as enablers of new forms of business models, of collaboration within and between different companies and even of advanced virtual organizations capable of coming together to share resources for a limited time to achieve a specific goal. This is confirmed quite simply by looking at the pilot implementations of the BEinGRID project, many of which leverage these aspects to enable new services or business models.

Later, in early 2007, the analysts commented that the utility computing vision that inspired the original (electricity) Grid analogy back in the day, was starting to come to fruition. The inherent flexibility and decentralized nature of Grid was enabling what was starting to be labeled as Software-as-a-Service.

The CHALLENGERS workshop, dating to that time, concluded:

Grid infrastructure still promises to attract and enable new businesses and radically change the relationships between a customer and its supply chain offering a flexible platform for a global collaboration. Grids lead to competitive advantage through better utilization of heterogeneous, resources by converting them to virtualized services. As a result, such innovative Grid-enabled applications have become offered as “Software as a Service (SaaS)”. (Although this term has been around since at least 2000, it would appear to have met significant mainstream use[1] only around January 2007, see below). The initial success of [the] SaaS model appears based on the supply of the service to new customers: small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) that could not otherwise have been served profitably.

Reading between the lines, the potential of virtualized resources offered to remote third parties, and of software ran remotely and provided on a pay per use model, was already recognized. Indeed, looking at early FP7 projects, such as SMART LM, (proposed in May 2006) we see an attempt by the community to evolve the world of software and services towards a more flexible approach that encompasses SaaS. (SmartLM handles the licenses as services and works with flexible models like extension, aggregation of licenses and introduces others that make prices become effectively independent of the underlying hardware).

Although, in contrast cloud computing does not exclusively claim a long-tail approach, it IS defined in terms of simplifying the provision for the end user and it seems that cloud has overtaken SaaS in the marketing terminology, an observation backed up the Google Trends image below and the current tendency to describe many of Google’s services as “in the cloud”. Perhaps then, it is fair to say that, if not the conclusion of this change, Cloud computing is at least the most notable manifestation at present of this change in focus of Grid.

So whilst cloud enjoys its lofty position at the peak of the Gartner hype cycle, let’s have a look at some of the reasons why that Cloud eclipsed its bigger brother.

Firstly cloud is defined in terms of user benefits, not what it is or how it works. Indeed, analysis I conducted in February 2009 showed that the first paragraphs of the Wikipedia pages for such terms as Grid computing, distributed computing, high performance computing, parallel computing and utility computing all defined the term in question in reference to the architecture or manner in which the computation is done. Cloud computing, on the other hand, defined itself in terms of delivering “scalable and often virtualized resources … as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them”.

Secondly, cloud computing as provided by Amazon was repackaged, rebranded, and extracted from the researchers who built it to be offered as a business service. Although the restricted beta of its first year of life was open only to researchers, it was clear from the outset that this was to be a professional and commercial service.

Thirdly, the cloud revolution was spear-headed by well known and trusted companies. Amazon itself is often credited with being one of the companies that inspired confidence in e-commerce. By being the pioneers of a new wave of commercial services, they instilled a customer confidence in cloud that would have been impossible for a start-up or a spin-off to generate. Additionally, having a mega-infrastructure, like Google and Yahoo! also, they were able to keep up with demand and grow at the market’s pace, not their rate of infrastructure acquisition.

And finally, cloud is so much more catchy than grid! Grid is an alright word, but admittedly somewhat utility. Like utility computing itself, it makes a good analogy to the electricity grid, sure, and a functional word suits a field that describes itself with a technical description, rather than what it does for its customers. But come to cloud, now that’s in a whole new stratosphere! There is an endless source of weather related metaphors and puns to whet the appetites of the wordsmithing marketers. And whilst I hasten to add that something as fickle as a name change is not generally sufficient to make a technology take off, one cannot deny that the marketing buzz that has been created around cloud is nothing short of electric.

So to conclude this post, and without raining on Amazon and co’s parade any further, I ask a final question: What will be the heir to the cloud? Who knows? Perhaps we will need some more blue sky thinking!

With thanks to Csilla Zsigri of The 41 Group for discussion and comments.

[1] Defined as having a search frequency in Google was high enough to register with Google Trends

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