Thanks for the comment. There are some very interesting context, history and data points in your post. And it’s very true that bandwidth has not increased at the same rate as processing power (the same thing applies to the home and is also shaping/constraining net usage there). But at the same time I don’t think this really limits utility computing to CPU-intensive applications. Unlike what the Globus guys had in mind, the people who are using EC2 today are not necessarily going “on the Grid” because they want to perform tasks that require a scale they can’t meet in their own datacenter. They are mostly doing thing they could do on their own but would rather not bother with (both from a Capex and administration perspective). Nothing in what they do requires the data to be far away from the processing. They’re just moving data and CPU as a pair from their own datacenter to one ran and managed by someone else. At least in scenarios where the end users go directly to the hosted system, there is no additional bandwidth requirement.

BTW, here is a direct link to Paul’s “Cloud computing” blog entry for those who will read this in a few weeks/months/years, when the entry has been pushed out of the front page by other interesting articles.

In order to discuss some of the issues surrounding The Cloud concept, I think it is important to place it in historical context, looking at the Cloud’s forerunners and the problems they encountered before being adopted.

On my blog, http://www.KeystonesAndRivets.com, I’ve tried to do that in my “Cloud Computing” post.

One of the current barriers in the way of The Cloud is economics. I argue that,

“Telecom prices have fallen and bandwidth has increased, but more slowly than processing power, leaving the economics worse than in 2003″.

And “I’m sure that advances will appear over the coming years to bring us closer, but at the moment there are too many issues and costs with network traffic and data movements to allow it to happen for all but select processor intensive applications, such as image rendering and finite modelling.”

Your comments and feedback are very welcome.

Regards

PJW

The flip side of this might be when an investment analyst starts looking at 10-Ks and finds that company A’s technology expenditures are extremely lower than company Bs. I have been saying this for a while now, when the “Mad Money” guy starts figuring out how clouds can help his investors he will start to yell.

johnmwillis.com