Robin Harris must have woken up grouchy today - he's dumping all over cloud hysteria on this fine Monday. After throwing the obligatory it's-all-marketing punch (the truth is that there IS a bunch of marketing, but there's also a bunch of real substance ... more on that in a minute), he gets down to business.

I am paraphrasing a bit, but here are his main points:

The only real key to Google's low cost structure is active cluster storage - if it's productized, anyone can be as cheap as Google (including your own datacenter).

Networks are still the thinnest resource in the computing landscape.

Consequently only low-data-rate applications are suitable for the cloud - all others will (or at least should) stay local.

Robin makes some good, albeit incomplete points, though not too sure about his conclusion. Go read his post, then let's look at his reasoning a bit at a time.

The Main Points

The only real key to Google's low cost structure is active cluster storage - if it's productized, anyone can approach Google's economics (including your own datacenter).

This is probably the biggest miss - perhaps more critical than the reliable commodity storage (which is important!), are all of the applications which natively run on commodity infrastructure. Each app generally runs as well as that particular app needs, and runs in a way that allows for some sort of operational sanity.

Google (& Amazon & others) have built a number of frameworks to make this true for their own applications, of course. Sometimes they build these sort of capabilities directly into the applications themselves. For everyone else, there is a clear need for platforms that reliably scale applications on commodity infrastructure- that is precisely why we built the application fabric.

Simple, coherent operational capabilities are also crucial. When a commodity infrastructure can basically run itself, it becomes a lot more attractive as a deployment option for the serious enterprise.

Networks are still the most limited resource in the computing landscape.

True beyond a shadow of a doubt! Robin makes a good point that the rate of improvement for networks lags behind other parts of computing (like his native storage land). My only caveat is that, while clearly limited, network bandwidth is just as clearly sufficient for many, many mainstream applications (particularly when structured as described below).

Consequently only low-data-rate applications are suitable for the cloud - all others will (or at least should) stay local.

I think many applications will clearly stay local - some for technical reasons, some for security, control and / or cultural reasons, some just because.

Having said that, some data-intense applications will still move to a cloud, provided that the data is stored near the corresponding computing elements. This alternative is even now beginning to play out, such as in the Amazon EC2 / S3 combo (among others). With this approach all high-bandwidth data operations are effectively local.

Practical Ramifications

In the rush to argue for or against cloud computing, many infrastructure-centric folks are missing a couple of key considerations - namely the critical nature of the applications and the need for simple operations.

Good grid-enabled applications (and this includes the storage layer) can run on commodity infrastructure wherever it's located - in a cloud or close to home - scale as needed, be both reliable and secure, operate itself, and be far cheaper than apps today.

In reality the argument between clouds and grids / application fabrics can become simply a deployment decision - and that may be the best news of all.