And The Clouds Shall Set Us Free

There is still about two weeks to Microsoft’s acclaimed Professional Developers Conference 2008, where all (or at least a lot) will be officially revealed. But I want to jump the gun and theorize, or perhaps even Dream, of what’s to come. It is widely expected that Microsoft will launch their next generation Cloud OS (Operating System), named Strata. Obviously this is mostly targeting servers, but the concept of servers and clients is becoming more and more obsolete as the computing devices undergo daily transformation.

It is a little known fact, but I have long been proponent of Cloud Computing, even if it wasn’t called that, back in a day. In fact, in late nineties I wrote a thesis paper on just such a design, proposing that roaming Java Agents, traveling over storage/computing platform compiled of thousand of cheap nodes (as in PCs), will comprise a super computing network. This was just around the time when Google where building their platform, and we all know how that turned out. In fact, another little known fact (it seems, though one would suggest that It Is Obvious) is that Google’s biggest competitive advantage isn’t their “amazing” search engine, but their Amazing computing platform, with thousands of nodes and Big Table architecture.

But, I digress. This post is about Microsoft, who I hope will finally join the official fray and come out with properly implemented computing cloud/platform (Disclaimer: I’ve said before that I have few Microsoft stocks that I own, so there! In fact, I keep recommending that you go out and pick some for yourself, they are Greatly Undervalued now).

This post is about Cloud Computing as a Game Changer! Though we are yet to see full power of properly implemented cloud, if done right, this can finally bring the cloud into the Corporate America. My hopes are that Microsoft are finally “getting it” and will unveil just such a platform, both hosted by them and available for purchase and installation in GE’s of the world (read: Big Corporations).

What is the single biggest place where this transformation should start? The DATA, silly!!!

This is turning into long post, with no pictures. So I’ll just stop, and if you’re interested to discuss it further, comments are open for just such a debate.

I leave you with a few resources for “fun” reading on the web. Yes, all of us in the IT world need to brace ourselves for this fundamental change, or perish with the dinosaurs.

The Original – Concepts behind Google’s BigTable
The Open Source – Apache’s Hadoop platform, and HBase BigTable like implementation on it
The High Performance – HyperTable is an attempt to produce something as fast as BigTable

The only handicap for our Cloud right now is the Network. I am sure that bigger people than me realize this, so change will come there also! So be sure and be ready (Netbook, anyone?)