Page 39 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

THE C L O UD REV O L UTION

He can tell it where to store the results and how to save his
software application to be run again. Such end users exist to-
day, but they are still relatively skilled programmers who are
familiar with the operations of servers on the Internet. But the
prerequisites for end user control will shrink rapidly as more
sophisticated user interfaces capture the possibilities of the

user/cloud relationship. Boxes of checklists, menu selections,
dials to power up and power down, and graphs illustrating
server levels of strength—the graphical user interface that
built up personal computing will soon be handing over more
control of Internet server clusters to end users.
With cloud computing, the master/slave relationship has
been banished. In its place, a new peer-to-peer relationship is

arising between client and server, and some of those servers
are found in the most powerful data centers in the world. It’s
a power shift that will initiate an age of more widely shared re-
sources, more equal access, and powerful servers that follow
instructions from remote end users. In the cloud, the com-
mon end user is a temporary king over a large domain—if her
credit card can support a short list of hourly fees.
This is the change that Ellison and other critics, looking
at the big data centers and seeing only a replica of what they’ve

already created, are missing: the self-provisioning aspect of the
cloud accompanied by end user programmatic control. Let
me offer a short, real-world example.
Amazon.com, in addition to its online store, has pioneered
cloud computing as a rentable infrastructure in its data cen-
ters called EC2. Outsiders may access its EC2 servers, provi-
sion a machine, place a workload on the machine, and get the

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