Enterprise Cloud Summit – Morning Recap #1

This morning kicked off the Enterprise Cloud Summit @ Interop in Las Vegas.  Allistair Croll from Bitcurrent is running the sessions today and started us off with a fairly interesting counterpoint to Nick Carr’s assertion that computing is quickly morphing to a model analogous to an electric utility.  His points about the dearth of standards and interoperability, and the fact that so much of computing requirements vary from consumer to consumer, make sense.  In contrast, electricity is a standard, fully interoperable, and generally homogenized.  

Paul Mockapetris, Chairman and Chief Scientist, Nominium, Inc.  “A brief history of Cloud Computing”

Paul gave a talk on the history of the cloud, starting back at the RAND Institute in 1960-62 with their work on distributed communications networks – which eventually led to the internet.  This was only moderately interesting and mostly review for the people in the audience.  His most interesting point was that the bottom of the stack may standardize over time – much like IP underpins all networking today.   The key however, is that users must be free to choose vendors, move their apps, set their own metrics, etc.