Developers Are Lifting The Cloud, Not The Other Way Around

For all the attention this week about the cloud, it’s evident that it is pretty much a distraction when considering what is really happening. Developers are lifting the cloud, not the other way around. The big guns of tech are aligning because they have to. It’s a defensive move to serve their existing customer base. It’s not lke the old kings are showing ?substantial revenue increases for new software licenses. But ?consolidating power to offer legacy technology does show that the cloud is anything you want to call it. In their new definition of the cloud, the IT-heavy enterprise gets a new version of that old-school database to run the software installed ten or 15 years ago. ?An operaitng systgem built for the desktop and client/server age can be recast as a cloud service. Older SaaS companies can work with former on-premise foes and happily proclaim that what worked for the past 14 years will be just fine for another two generations or more. Just like cowbell, there is never enough. But these moves to align CRM and operating systems with legacy databases are not about innovation. They are simply meant to keep the status quo and offer the bread and butter business that have earned them billions in revenue. The real innovation is in the new genre of databases, developer frameworks, ?social coding services and the APIs enriched with context through data analysis. It’s not to say the cloud lacks value. It has plenty of that. The cloud is really all about value. Prices continue to drop for compute and storage. On Joyent, a developer can now pay by the second. But look deep into the infrastructure and there are signs even there of the developer’s work. Hearing more about this idea of the software defined data center? It’s this concept that software, not metal switches, do the work with APIs connecting it all together. The APIs connect networks, data stores, all forms of clients and databases, etc. It’s the act of the network going to the app instead of the other way around. So all the machines and the pipes are getting abstracted and the developer, arguably, is driving that change. The smartphone is a server. As again illustrated by Joyent with Project Manta, the big storage and network machines are now becoming part of the operating system. Compute and storage are coming together and in-memory databases make

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