Beyond the hype of cloud computing

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Brian Proffitt.

Despite all of the hype that cloud computing is getting, a recent survey shows that in terms of actual pace of deployment, three popular open source cloud computing platforms are not exactly seeing growth to match that hype. The results might be surprising for followers of cloud computing, but not to the company that conducted the annual "State of the Open Source Cloud" survey, Zenoss. This news is just confirming what they already knew: that cloud is a ways off from being a ready-to-use tool and customers know it.

Just ask Floyd Strimling, VP of Community at Zenoss. Actually, you probably won’t have to ask him – he’ll most likely tell you anyway. From Strimling’s point of view, cloud adoption is very much like the perceived U.S. political landscape, with a very loud one percent actually adopting and hyping the cloud, with the rest, "the 99-percenters," having little to no idea what to do with cloud computing…

For Strimling, the juxtaposition of the survey results reflects exactly that. When 50.5 percent of respondents state that they are planning to deploy OpenStack (with 18.3 percent looking at CloudStack and 9.2 percent at Eucalyptus), that sounds like the OpenStack marketing machine is doing quite well. But then when asked about the timeframe of that deployment, only one quarter of the survey respondents (25.9 percent) were planning to do so in 2013. All of the rest were at least one or two years out from deployment, or more. This is purely a matter of maturity, Strimling explained. When you look at OpenStack, you see a collection of separate products, like Swift, Nova, and Quantum that have been gathered together and re-branded under one brand…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/302030/beyond-hype-cloud-computing