hours. They are still ahead on cost, giv-
en the alternative of having to purchase
the hardware outright and build it up to
support a peak load.
cReeGeR: So, the analogy would be to
analyze the cost of either purchasing
a car or taking taxis to meet personal
transportation needs?
VoGeLs: Engineers are not well
trained to think about end-to-end cost.
MapReduce and other examples have
shown us that the end-to-end picture
of cost looks very different from what
you would normally expect. We have
to learn to think about the whole pack-
age—at storage, computation, and what
the application needs to do—and really
reason about what the axis of scale and
cost really is.

cReeGeR: I’d like to go around the room once and give some final recommendations to the folks who are struggling to try to make sense of all this.

RAmLeTh: This is not a technology game but a change-management game. The goal is to get people to understand that it is not dangerous to think this way. We have three rules:

Think about what you can do that ˲ can benefit service delivery in aggregate; don’t focus on the small subcom-ponents that can lead to suboptimal solutions.

Don’t think about how you’re go- ˲ ing to distribute your costs before you start any effort. Make sure that internal charging mechanisms (allocations) are not obstacles for change and progress.

Don’t think about and design fu- ˲ ture organization changes. Base decisions on organizational benefit and not on increased power to you as a manager or to your organization.

If you think about these three things, it’s amazing what an organization can actually do.

BADRos: The beauty of what we’re talking about is that it’s so easy to try. You don’t need a big budget or approvals to get started. The fact that you can do this so simply enables innovation that would be unavailable if you needed to purchase a big piece of hardware ahead of time.

TucKeR: As services move into the Internet, they become easier and more cost effective. This also means a shift in power in IT away from those who control capital resources to the users and developers who use self-service to pro-

GReG oLsen
cloud computing
presents a
compelling
opportunity
for consumers
of information
technology
and producers
of information
services.

vision their own applications. When
FedEx went online, people were taken
out of the support loop and custom-
ers could find their package status in-
formation themselves whenever it was
needed. You can now apply the same
principle to the provisioning of com-
puting resources. A developer can have
a server provisioned to run an applica-
tion without having to contact a hu-
man. That cuts the most costly aspect
of computing out of the equation.
oLsen: Cloud computing presents a
compelling opportunity for consumers
of information technology and produc-
ers of information services. Applica-
tion builders should take advantage of
existing functionality they can buy as
opposed to the past practice of build-
ing their own and focus their resources
on the unique capability they alone
can deliver. Consumers of information
technology have got to rethink where
they look for functionality. If they don’t
adapt their service delivery models,
then they will quickly become obsolete.

cReeGeR: Reducing cost and enabling overall agility are what I believe you all are trying to say. Cloud computing has the potential for removing business friction to make more services possible and to do so much more easily, with less risk and capital outlay. I think that is as good a summary as any for something as transformative as cloud computing. Thank you all very much for your time, talent, and wisdom.

 

Related articles on queue.acm.org

For the complete version of this CTO Roundtable discussion, visit

http:// http://queue.acm.org/detail. cfm?id=1551646

Describing the Elephant

Ian Foster and Steven Tuecke

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1080874

Enterprise Software as Service

Dean Jacobs

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1080875

CTO Roundtable: Virtualization

Mache Creeger (moderator)

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1400229

Mache Creeger ( [e-mail]) is a technology industry veteran based in silicon Valley. along with being a columnist for ACM Queue, he is the principal of emergent technology associates, marketing and business development consultants to technology companies worldwide.