So, I found this e-mail on Friday saying that “@botchagalupe is in town, feel like a beer together?”.

Botchagalupe aka John Willis is one of the best known Cloud evangelists and a legend in System Management; he is actually “involved” with Canonical and spreading the word on agility and life-cycle management on Cloud. You can read his thoughts on his well known blog.

The e-mail came from Kris Buytaert: Mr. “Everything is a freaking DNS problem“. If you don’t get it (the DNS, I mean) you are a candidate for one of his T-Shirts but you actually might not want it
Besides his fondness for DNS, he is an Open Source specialist that has been giving a strong contribution to the community by maintaining several projects, among them OpenMosix. Kris is an Inuit and is deeply involved in DevOps. Read his blog here.

So we head to Antwerp which happens to be one of the most important cities of Belgium: a land holding the record for the number of beer sorts (around 9.000).

 (Cloud + Vision)/Beer = entropic talking

So, while the Kwak came and went, we had quite an interesting time jumping on diverse topics (for the record: I carefully kept away from technicalities, I don’t want Kris to print a Cloud T-shirt just for me!).
Of the many views we shared there is one on where I want to risk my neck and tell world+dog what I think:

I believe the majority of the IT community is not able to define what Cloud Computing is, thus far.

John is pretty sharp in defining Cloud Computing: “It’s an operational model“.

Amen… I agree.

And I would like to add: “Cloud Computing is not relevant, per se!, What is really relevant is the whole new class of problems and solutions that are to be introduced adopting this operational model“.

The scale of Cloud Computing demands a new approach on security, efficient resource management, application architectures.

And, be no fools: implementing Cloud Computing is a matter either of failing or being successful. It evolved fast because of the incentive of having results exposed to public (or private) “ludibrium”.

The outcome is a good kind of pressure: stimulus to innovation and consistency.

As I see it: Cloud Computing imposes maturity by visibility. That’s a sort of revolution.

Oh, and  maturity an governance on the Cloud might become the next big viral infection; every CIO of this planet could become a potential target as soon as an efficient and maintainable operational model becomes ubiquitous, measurable and, most of all, commoditized.

At the end Cloud Computing might be as relevant as silicon: it’s everywhere but it’s totally hidden before our eyes. This is why we need maturity to keep knocking at the door of every IT shop.

Keep playing with PaaS, SaaS, IaaS or whatever aaS you might think of: it’s an operational model.