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Clouds Are Inherently Self-Service

Posted on April 30, 2009 by su

 

This is something I say a lot in person, but wanted to actually say outright somewhere.  My primary defining business characteristic of ‘cloud computing’ is that it’s ‘self-service’.  And by self-service I mean:

That’s it.  Simple.  Straightforward, and a good measuring stick.  So if someone says: “Do you think a cloud needs to have an API?” you ask yourself, does an API help make it ‘self-service’?  And the answer is yes.  Could a cloud exist that does not have an API?  Sure, that’s possible, but not if the alternative is calling up a person or filing a ticket.  That’s not very ‘on-demand’ now is it?

This is my cloud measuring stick.  There are many like it, but this one is mine.  ;)

 

UPDATE: added bullets #4-6 for clarity

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  • Steven

    I like it. People typically assume the cloud means “Utility” or “Automagical”. Self Service makes sense.

  • http://neotactics.com randybias

    Thanks for your comment, Steven. I agree. See my other related post on 'automagical' scaling here:

    http://neotactics.com/blog/uncategorized/auto-m…

    –Randy

  • http://www.giannii.com Giannii

    test #giannii

  • Laurence Faux

    Perhaps it would be good to also mention that this is from the perspective of the consumer of the cloud service.
    It is my experience that folks often mix up the What of such definitions with the How….(certainly when it comes to Cloud, people incorrectly insisting on including the “V” word) and restricting the perspective to the Service Consumer often help focus the reader on the externally observable characteristics without overly concerning themsleves with how they are achieved.

    At then end of the day its the outside of the cloud that we see…..and remember that a cloud comprises of no more than what are already familiar with…just in another form.

  • http://neotactics.com randybias

    I generally agree. What I think you're trying to say here is that clouds are very similar to an autonomous systems. You just see the amorphous outside and it's interfaces and don't necessarily need to know what's happening under the covers.

    Again, for me, measuring whether a given service is a 'cloud' or not has a lot to do with the ability to provide self-service. This winds up lumping applications, platforms, and infrastructure into the same 'cloud' bucket, but when we're talking about 'cloud' in the broadest terms then I think that this measuring stick helps to determine if it's really a cloud.

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  • http://johnmwillis.com botchagalupe

    Randy,

    Thanks for this post. This is a good definition. However, I think there is another definition that is used in the enterprise for self service. What I have seen in the enterprise is the use of self service to isolate the technology from the customer. For example I have worked with one company where they have a SS portal that allows them, with an internal credit card, to select a blog, wiki, dev system, lamp stack from the portal. The have no idea if they are getting VMware, AWS, or bare metal and it doesn’t matter to them. Other examples are engineering teams selecting analytic clusters by selecting a. number of cpus, b. how much memory, and c. bandwidth. Again, they get the resources and they don’t know or care about the platform.

    I also have built a few self service portals using this same concept to abstract monitoring technology. I had one client where all of their internal customers hated Tivoli. We built a self service portal around all of their monitoring tools. They where then able to select the hosts and the resources they wanted to monitor and every one was happy. They also reduced head count.

    Again, thanks for this post. I can see now why I got so much push back from my tweets last night. You are the Bomb…

    john
    johnmwillis.com

  • http://neotactics.com randybias

    @botchagalupe

    Thanks for the kind words and comment, John. I think you’re just adding clarification about what makes the power of ‘self-service’ so important.

  • http://www.cloudfrontoffice.com/ Rodrigo

    Agreed. Cloud is all about self-service

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