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Platforms in the Cloud: Where Will Your Next Application Run?
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Wednesday, April 07, 2010
ESRI has posted the
slides from the keynote I gave at their Developer Summit last month. The talk takes a big-picture view of cloud platforms today, providing a taxonomy for thinking about the leading offerings (both public and private). It ends with a look at what ESRI is doing in the cloud, but most of the talk isn't specific to the
GIS world.
After resisting it for quite a while, I've given in to using the IaaS/PaaS categorization for public cloud platforms. I still think it's full of problems, but whether I like it or not, this way of talking about the space has become almost universal.
And I'm still not crazy about the term "private cloud". Technically, a private cloud is essentially IaaS in your data center, but the large scale and pay-as-you-go economics of public clouds aren't available in typical private clouds. This makes them different in fundamentally important ways. Still, it's clear that private clouds are what most people think of as the evolution of today's virtualized data centers, and the term is clearly here to stay.
As these slides suggest, we're seeing some convergence of what cloud platforms provide. This is a good thing--it's what happens as markets mature--but there's still a long way to go. As I'm so fond of saying, big platform shifts like this happen rarely; it's a great time to be alilve.
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