Book Review: The Big Switch
I have finished reading “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google“, and although I have been an advocate of cloud computing (S3, EC2) before, this even more strongly reinforced my beliefs about the switch to utility computing. It talks about the original usage of electrical systems in the world, replacing the water-wheels at manufacturing facilities, but where the company still runs their own power generation. I particularly found amusing a quote about how the manufacturing companies when faced with electricity that could be bought from a utility, brought up the fears of “what if it goes down”. This is the exact same fear I hear people in enterprise hosting bring up about Amazon S3, or Google Apps. The cost and complexity of hosting today in an Enterprise IT environment, with the overwhelming complexity of compliance, disaster recovery planning, data backup, change management, release management, funding prioritization creates a stunningly difficult solution to hosting software. With the complete ease of signing up and using hosted applications such as Google Apps, it makes me feel sure that yes, the movement will move towards utility computing.
