Discussion on:

Why the Batphone keeps ringing in the cloud: Hardware matters more than ever now

plus ??a change, plus c'est la m??me chose

You do realize that CEOs and CFOs will simply blame US for their stupid mistakes, as usual right?

This Business and the Fashion Industry are too much alike for my taste.

I certainly wouldn't disagree.

Of course! because since Cloud Computing has been sold and oversold that you won't need IT experts to run it. Guess to whom your friendly neighborhood Cloud Computing provider will sell to? CEOs and CFOs! And they will NOT involve IT in it (because of course, according to them IT has a vested interest in keeping its fiefdom) So they'll buy whatever sounds nice and charge the responsability of its failures to IT.
(which of course will have a skeleton crew because "with Cloud Computing you don't need an IT departement")

Same thing that has happened with ERP projects for the last 20 years, same thing that has happened with CRM projects for the last 10 years.

Anybody remembers how Microsoft used sell their TCO nonsense? (you won't need experts to run NT as it happens in Unix)

My father (who was in this business for 30 years) used to say during the whole of his professional life he had seen how they kept on selling the "computer that fixes itself". Nothing has changed.

and bad configurations, practices, etc., of the service providers and the networks over which data travels. In the examle case, I don't see a difference between a cloud-based webserver or any other manner of providing a webserver. But running applications in an internet cloud will likely expose failure to allocate CPU cycles or bandwidth more often. It will also tend to expose poor network routing - including bad Anycast configuration - which is really pretty darn common.

Cloud computing really puts the cart before the horse of the internet. Hopefully, that horse will be pushed up to the front and harnessed to satisfy the needs of cloud computing, making it better for all purposes. More likely, cloud users and providers will need to pay up for a better SLA for transport and peering. Even more likely, everyone will have to pay more to satisfy these needs, even though most people are paying well enough already.

If the problem is just on the cloud-provider's end, then they need to live up to their agreements immediately. Whether or not the customer knows what specific hardware, and how much of it, and the the other customer's needs for cloudspace which are in competition with their own, the customer needs to secure an SLA reflecting thier actual needs, and force the provider to stick to it. But if the customer knows that the hardware is ten years out of date, yes, I suppose they would be wise to shop elsewhere.

are going to be critical, but I don't know how much leverage the customer is going to have in getting them enforced. Even voting with your feet may be difficult if they're holding your data hostage.