Netbooks accelerate The Cloud?

The move to "netbooks" and other always connected devices seems to finally be here to stay - it's been talked for a while, but the convergence of technology and economics to make it a reality is now with us.
There is a very interesting article in Wired (if I remember well) that chronicles the "strange" history of the new generation of "netbooks": how something that was created to address the needs of those who cannot afford the current laptops ended up filling a real need even amongst those who are the target of these current laptops. Essentially, we have reached the point in which these tools are becoming appliances, judged more by the function they actually fulfil than by the performances they can exhibit regardless of our need for them.

Combined with the emergence of The Cloud, this shift promises a change in the way all of us, consumers and enterprises, will interact with applications. It seems obvious, but the trend is accelerating. Applications will be at least partially on The Cloud, they will be multi-device, multi-access, asynchronous.

That will bring a series of challenges to us, software architects. We will need to make The Cloud ensure the viability of the model for complex, long lived, IP rich, confidential, secure flows. We will need to make the asynchronous models work well. We will need to make the user interfaces multi-device and secure, etc...
One proof this is moving forward, and fast, is that companies such as Microsoft, which do not create trends but make them mainstream, are getting there. The Azure effort (http://www.microsoft.com/azure/) is well known, but they are thinking across the board on user interfaces, on new browser (the window to The Cloud) architecture approaches (http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/79655/gazelle.pdf).

It will also bring challenges to the business models for software products, of course. The current models are not adapted, and it will take time before a norm gets established.
It will also bring new security needs: big cloud centers will need to be protected against all sorts of attacks, cyber and physical, etc.

Interesting disruption.

The cloud matters

Well, this is certainly going to be "duh"-obvious, but it's clear that we are entering the year of The Cloud. The rapid-fire succession of announcements from major players of one or another form of cloud offering is not just the result of flock mentality or boredom early in the year: it's a symptom of the relevance the cloud has reached.

Why now?

- A first reason is the current crisis. On each and every project, controlling cost has become the core preoccupation. And I really mean control as in exerting control over it, predicting it, managing it, not just containing it.
- A second reason is the availability of manageable technical solutions to support cloud-based platforms and applications. We are beyond cloud-supported data or document storage, we are now in the days of cloud-supported services and netbooks.
- And a third reason is the emergence of cloud providers with enough clout to allow significant early adopters to take the rational bet of overcoming the remaining complexities and confusions and start leveraging the offerings. Traditional platform vendors, major Web Commerce players, innovative newcomers.

The confluence of these three trends is - in my neophyte opinion - the key for the unavoidable success of The Cloud in 2009.

How will that happen?

- The economic drivers make The Cloud more relevant. Projects will focus on the management of cost, and The Cloud's inherent support for controllable scalability will make it the most attractive platform to work on.

- The innovative development community - including software vendors as well as system integrators - will flock to The Cloud, will support the development of the corresponding tooling (IDEs, platforms/middleware, ...) and will ensure the success of the various cloud-based or cloud-supported platforms (PaaS) on which service-based (SaaS) applications will be created and/or composed.

- The support for dedicated governance and management provided by cloud-based or cloud-supported platforms will prove to be very attractive to businesses having been burnt by previous attempts to create on-premise major SOA applications.

- Governance, life cycle management, etc, will become sources of differentiation between cloud offerings, and that will lead to significant innovation and momentum in that very key domain.

- Ubiquity and better governance and management will enable more customer/collaboration/social-centric (rather than process-centric) applications, shifting the focus from typical B2B/B2C to Business-to-Community (B2Comm?).

- Which will create further need for differentiation, better quality services, easier to assemble into high value evolving adaptive applications taking as part of their essence the various communities (users, analysts, customers, etc..)

- Development will be permanent, deployment frequent, adaption constant. New cultural points of view will be included in the applications.

- Etc.

All this, all this enabled by the fact that The Cloud makes the applications cost manageable. It becomes something that can be throttled. Just think about it: how can we compare the cost manageability of a major cloud-supported enterprise application versus a major J2EE enterprise application (if you want to suffer, say Websphere)?


What to be careful about?

Applications, in particular the "enterprise" applications I deal with, live and die through the quality of the decisions they support. An application can be very beautiful and execute very fast and in a secure way, but it fails to generate the business value that is expected, it's growth - or even it's survival - is questionnable.

Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) or Decision Management (DM) addresses that. In the pre-cloud days.

The challenge is now to think about how to approach EDM / DM for The Cloud.

Interesting times.