Cloud computing market is starting to look a lot like one big data center

September 16, 2011, 6:15 PM — An interesting thing has been happening on the way to the fully cloud-ified IT universe in which every company is able to call on as much computing power as it needs, of whatever kind, using whatever software, at that time return it to the vast, immutable ether, paying later only for what the used of this vast and magical power without being responsible for creating, training, feeding or protecting anything at all.

As more and more services, companies, computer functions and preventers-of-evil-computer-functions cram into the cloud-computing market, the market in its entirety is starting to look a lot more like any single location connected to it.

So, yes, there's a mysterious gloss on cloudish information innovation structures, a little pixie dust.

Generally the fog of marketing-speak is so thick you can't see the real structure of what the infrastructure of what cloud computing is becoming as an industry without getting dangerously close, fighting your way through glitter haboobies and dodging rabid killer unicorns to do it.

It looks suspiciously like networks divided into the seven OSI functional layers or data-center diagrams drawn by people with so weak a sense of space they put the storage 100 miles from the transaction processing monitor.

You have to do the Layer 2 part yourself – packing your odd-tasting foreign data into packets other networks are willing to take with them and apps are willing to taste.

What cloud platform software is all about

Layer 5 – Session – is what cloud platform software is all about. It's a broker that sets up connections between apps and databases, apps and other apps, apps and networks, deals with their conflicts and fights, divorces them when necessary, and kills or drives them off the cloud when it's time for the end user using them to go.

IAAS services like Amazon's EC2 live here. It lets you play in the data center and expects you to do something useful during you're at it, which is surprisingly complex and difficult for research that's supposed to be easy.

A lot of companies don't like how little control that gives them, so Microsoft added more ability to manage individual apps, change the amount of memory or disk space or glitter any given app gets, to let clients tune the performance they get. It's for all that basically a generic Windows server you rent straight from Microsoft, although.

Whole market segment – the Apps Layer

Layer 7 is a whole market segment – the Apps Layer. SAAS is all layer 7. So are all the apps are available as software as a service, run on Infrastructure as a Service or Platform as a Service, hide data in storage as a Service, let users talk about it over Unified Communications as a Service or Videoconferencing as a service and even keep their strength up using location-sensitive dietary supply operations specializing in Italian, Chinese or even American nutritional products in the burgeoning Lunch Delivery as a Service.

Don't let it all scare you. It's perfectly OK that the Cloud is as a matter of fact made up of networks and data centers and that even that, looked at in its entirety, the cloud-computing market is starting to look more and more like one giant, highly distributed data center.

They know business users would or rather not see any of that, and that explains it. Users shouldn’t have to learn geek-speak to get their work done.

When business managers need and ERP system faster than IT can deliver, they know they can go rent one themselves; And the ERP landlords know the clients want to see mystery and power, not bits, bytes and bolts.

That would only make it a lot more clear that, at some point, the cloud computing industry is going to start consolidating because it's way too expensive for all those companies to keep all that innovation going 24/7 pursuant to this agreement all those layers of abstraction serving clients who come to them for servers and storage and someone else for content distribution and web serving and someone else for security and backup and remote access and more storage and app/dev space and email distribution and...

The way it once

IT won't go back to being do-it-yourself the way it once was. Nevertheless cloud computing won't remain a market filled with one-trick-ponies, either. Not even if the ponies are unicorns.