Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

The Network Is the Computer

In some of the preceding analysis, we’ve treated the nodes as independent, with the idea being that customers and their processing are partitioned. However, we can solve some problems by letting customers with demand that is too great for one node spill over to another one. This is the same as your local electric utility pulling in power over the grid from a distant one or your overbooked city hotel getting you a room at another one in the chain on the outskirts of town.

In this model, the resources are dispersed but rather than being a collection of pieces, they act as an intelligent whole. Customers are served by whichever node has capacity and the correct collection of data and services needed. Resources are physically dispersed but logically centralized and integrated.

John Gage, one of Sun Microsystems’ first employees, has been credited with the phrase “The Network is the Computer.”9 More recently, Lew Tucker, formerly of Sun and now vice president and chief technology officer (CTO) of cloud computing at Cisco, observed that the network is the platform10; in other words, it becomes a programmable system. When I spoke with Lew on stage at Om Malik’s Structure 2011 event, we shared a vision of the cloud as being not just a computing utility but as the next generation of intelligent, logically consolidated, physically distributed computing.11 In this vision, the network is not the computer in the sense that the network replaces the computer; rather, ...