The Curious Case of Impulse Computing

 

There is a lot of passion around defining cloud computing, and frankly a lot of traditional enterprise vendors are playing defense. In chess they would call it a quiet defense, moving pieces into positions where they can defend dynamically if called upon. The reason is simple: Amazon web services, as delivered today, represent a massive, seminal, and watershed moment in the commodification of infrastructure—IF—the comparison is to enterprise infrastructure today. If AWS cloud infrastructure as a service is going to replace their customer’s current spend they want to position their architecture as what a cloud ‘is’ to soften the blow.

But thinking about cloud computing as a ‘replacement’ trend is a bit daft.

The other big distraction is comparing it in cost to building and running your own data-center on a fulltime basis.Costs should favor as a service offerings over time as the market expands; its hit or miss today. 

But comparing the costs of something you can access for a moment to the cost of committing to it for four years is a bit daft.

These quagmires started making a lot more sense to me when I asked myself: “What percentage of AWS revenue is from projects that otherwise wouldn’t have happened?” I believe more than a third, and that third is where the really interesting things are happening.

Cloud infrastructures are the ultimate friend of the unproven idea. The impulsive act of computational creativity not worth pushing through a heavy-weight process. The application idea no Tesla driving MBA on Sand Hill wanted to fund. The quick run you need right now before your presentation submission—a whole array of processing and storage acts not worth the social burden of scheduling metaphorical camera crew for, but very worth pulling a Flip out of your pocket. It quite literally, grew, the addressable market for computing in the same way the Flip grew video.

This ‘Big Think’ video from Robert Cialdini

http://bigthink.com/robertcialdini/robert-cialdini-explores-the-neuroscience-of-influence

offers us a great clue as to why. Being out of step with a group causes us literal physical pain on a small scale. The bigger the social burden in explaining our creative ideas, the less likely we are to pursue them. What’s that mr MBA? You didn’t have that as a project cost on your spread-sheet? Exactly.

So What:

• Opportunity costs, are the greatest cost savings generated by cloud computing.
• Use cloud computing to unleash your organizational creativity. Any software developer you are willing to pay a handsome salary too should also have an unlimited @Rackcloud account at her disposal.
• Computing power over time will come to resemble our attitudes towards bandwidth.  Use whatever you want within some generous limit without asking.
• Vendors need to wake up to the dynamics of more impulsive projects. It won’t be easy, much of enterprise IT is focused on availability.

Advertisement