Resources to get upto speed on Cloud Computing

After a short hiatus I am back to pursuing my passion of seeing cloud computing make a meaningful impact for businesses.  High tech company executives have been chastised for confusing users about this paradigm.  Rightly so because many existing products were renamed as cloud computing products.  In defense of the high tech companies, the fact is that cloud computing is not a revolution but an evolution;E commerce has been around for more than a decade.  Some of the ideas such as virtual desktops have been around for several years.

So what is different now? One big difference is that we now have more reliable networks, be it data or voice.  More Users have broadband connections and have come to depend on the network. Cloud computing is an evolution where users are willing to use compute power in the network, using various access devices including smart phones.  It is still a change from the past because users need to trust the cloud computing service provider to render services without interruptions, and secure all personal data.  In the past, service interruptions were due to disk crashes or virus attacks on the personal computer.

A friend recently asked me how she could get up to speed on cloud computing, and which books would help.  My initial instinct was to say there are no books, but then I went to check on Amazon.  Sure enough there were no less than 293 books on “cloud computing”, several available for pre order.  The books reminded me of blind men describing an elephant.  This is not to demean their efforts in anyway, because I would explain it in a way my thinking has been shaped over the years. Books should help us synthesize the collective thought process and define the common vocabulary where there is a consensus.  Since this is such a big and emerging topic, it takes time for the dust to settle.  NIST, a US government agency had to step in and provide a definition of cloud computing we could agree on.  Analyst firms like Gartner and Forrester have variations of this. 

In the information age and with a topic as fluid as Cloud Computing it is imperative to keep in touch with daily news and blogging.  I have found the following to be great sources.

a) Gigaom  http://gigaom.com

b) Phil Wainewright  http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS

 c) Sandhill.com http://www.sandhill.com/

d) Cloudbook.net http://www.cloudbook.net/

 e) And to top it all (no pun intended) Guy Kawasaki’s new venture “Alltop” – a news aggregator.  http://cloud-computing.alltop.com/

f) Google groups – cloud-computing@googlegroups.com

– Ranjit Nayak