Page 133 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

O VERCOMING RESISTANCE T O THE CL OUD

mained aloof from neutral formats to preserve the proprietary
advantage of being ahead of the crowd. But cloud computing
didn’t come about as the result of a breakthrough by any single
vendor. There’s a large public sphere contribution to the cloud
in the standards of the Internet and Web services. In the long
run, lack of ease of migration is going to slow the adoption of

cloud computing until end users find so many ways around it
that vendors back off from their proprietary formats. No one
cloud is going to be good at every form of cloud computing,
so users will naturally wish to move between clouds for differ-
ent jobs. In the long run, those vendors that insist that the
world conform to their (and only their) standard will find it
increasingly difficult to find new customers.

Many people find Amazon’s EC2 a useful place to do com-
puting and know how to build AMIs. But even these users
should stay watchful. New tools or start-up vendor services will
spring into being to help you convert out of AMIs into OVF or
one of the other familiar virtual machine formats. A request
to your Amazon representative for a reverse converter, re-
peated enough times, might allow the message to sink in. Cus-
tomers aren’t quite in the driver’s seat with cloud computing,
but they’re much closer to it than in the previous phases of

computing.
And Amazon’s per hour pricing has been competitive
enough to set a de facto standard that other vendors have to
try to meet. Microsoft positioned its Azure hourly charges only
slightly higher than Amazon’s, despite the fact that Microsoft
can offer a more richly tooled environment with more cloud

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