The Cloud–a place for my stuff

I keep trying to come up with new ways to describe clouds and what it means to run things in the cloud and to do things in the cloud.

To quote a really old George Carlin skit; a place for my stuff.  “That is the whole meaning of life, to find a place for my stuff”.

In the cloud world there are private places and public places.  A private cloud is a cloud that you are responsible for.  A public cloud is a cloud that someone else is responsible for.

The “location” of your cloud infers the physical location and who owns and manages that physical location.  If it is private, then you own or manage that physical location.  If it is public then someone else does.

In the end.  A cloud is not a new thing, but a new word describing an old thing.  It describes infrastructure.  The new thing is how you interact with that infrastructure – this is where underwear gets all knotted up.

When moving to clouds – someone loses control.  And it is that change in control that things someone other than me is messing with my stuff.

Personally, I love my SkyDrive.  Cloud based storage that I can interact with from anywhere.  A place for my document and picture (files) stuff.

I also like Gmail and Hotmail.  Most folks don’t think of these as cloud either, but they are.  Because they are off, somewhere else.  And, they are a place for my email stuff.

I like Azure.  It is my cloud based infrastructure.  I don’t have to worry about controlling it, because Azure does that.  I just tell it to run my stuff and it does.  A place for my workload stuff.

So, for me.  I have a place for my stuff.  I know where that physical place is.  Coming form the IT Pro background I have a need to know that physical place to link my stuff with a location, even if that location is a service.

But, I just feel good that I have a place for my stuff.  And that I can get to my stuff.  From any of my other stuff.  And I don’t have to manage all aspects of my stuff.