The top 12 gifts of cloud from 2010

We've seen an amazing year of technology, disruption, and adoption--one I personally think will go down in history as one of the most significant years in computing history. Of course, a significant new tool has been added to the IT toolbox, and its one that will in the end replace most of the tools we know today.

Don't agree with me? So then, with the help of my generous Twitter community--and in the spirit of the season here in the US--I've assembled 12 innovations and announcements from 2010 that had big impact on the IT market. Take a look at these with an open mind and ponder just how much cloud computing changed the landscape through the course of the year:

1. The growth of cloud and cloud capacityThe number of cloud computing data centers skyrocketed in 2010, with massive investment by both existing and new cloud providers creating a huge burst in available cloud capacity. You might have noticed new services from Verizon, IBM, Terremark, and others. Tom Lounibos, CEO of "test in the cloud" success story SOASTA, notes that the number of data centers offered by Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM alone grew from four to 10, with that number slated to grow to more than 20 in the coming year.

2. The acceptance of the cloud modelA number of studies showed a dramatic switch in the acceptance of the cloud model by enterprise IT between 2009 and 2010. Two that I often quote are one by the Yankee Group that noted that 60 percent of "IT influencers" but consider cloud computing services an enabler, versus 40 percent who considered it "immature"--a complete reversal from 2009. The second, published by Savvis, claimed that 70 percent of IT influencers were using or planning to use cloud services within two years. Since at that time, most studies show cloud computing becoming an increasingly high priority for CIOs everywhere.

3. Private cloud debated...to a truceHeated debates between representatives of public cloud computing companies and more traditional IT computing vendors raged over the summer of 2010, with the former arguing that there is no such thing as a "private cloud," and the latter arguing that there at any rate is, and it should be an option in every IT arsenal. The argument died down, nevertheless, when both sides realized nobody was listening, and various components of the IT community were pursuing one or the other--or both--options whether or not it was "right."

5. Cloud legal issues come to the forefrontToward the end of the year, Amazon's decision to unilaterally shut down WikiLeaks' presence on their site demonstrated one of the true risks of the public cloud today: if a customer builds their business on a public cloud environment, and the provider terminates that relationship immediately or recourse, what are those customer's rights? The scenario was repeated in a different form with the shutdown of low-cost content-distribution provider SimpleCDN by a reseller of a third-party hosting environment. The issue here isn't whether the terminated party was doing right or wrong now what rights the law establishes for all parties in a public cloud operations scenario.

6. Cloud economics definedTwo seminal works of cloud economic analysis had significant impact on our understanding of the forces behind cloud computing adoption. Joe Weinman's "Mathematical Proof of the Inevitability of Cloud Computing," published in November 2009, treated us to a carefully thought out "proof" of why pay-per-use pricing will in the end capture such a large chunk of our application workloads. James Hamilton's "Cloud Computing Economies of Scale" analyzes of the economics of the data center, and why a large scale provider with a wide customer base has tremendous advantages over a smaller provider with a smaller customer base.

7. The rise of DevOpsThose of us studying cloud computing for some time have noted that cloud computing models are both the result of and driver for changes in the way we design, deploy, and operate applications in a virtualized model. We've seen a shift away from server-centric models to application-centric alternatives, and a rapid change from manual processes to automated operations. This, in turn, has driven several software methods that combine development and operations planning and execution. The result is automation packaged *with* the application at deployment time, in other words than developed afterwards-the-fact in a reactive fashion.

8. Open source both challenged and engagedAt the beginning of the year, open-source developers were watching developments in the cloud computing space with a wary eye and rightfully so. For infrastructure projects, the model threatens to change the community nature of open source. Nevertheless, the year as well showed us that open source plays a critical role in both cloud provider infrastructure and the software systems we build and run in the cloud. For all that, OSS seems to have found peace with the cloud, even though much has but to be worked out.

10. Amazon Web Services marches onAmazon Web Services continues to push an in every respect new model for IT service creation, delivery, and operation. Key examples of what Amazon Web Services has introduced this year include: an Asia-Pacific data center; free tiers for SQS, EC2, S3 and others; cluster compute instances; and the recently announced VMDK import feature. Not to mention the continuous stream of improvements to existing features, and additional support for then-known application environments.

James Urquhart is a field technologist with nearly 20 years of experience in distributed-systems development and deployment, focusing on service-oriented architectures, cloud computing, and virtualization. James is a market strategist for cloud computing at Cisco Systems and an adviser to EnStratus, although the opinions expressed here are strictly his own. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET.

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The Wisdom of Clouds

The Wisdom of Clouds, a CNET Tech blog by James Urquhart, covers cloud computing, virtualization, SaaS, data centers, and much more.

As this historic year wraps up, let's take a look back at what shaped the burgeoning cloud computing market in 2010. Clearly, with the holidays upon us, it only seems right to choose the top 12.

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