The bare-bones cloud: Why bother?

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Andrew C. Oliver.

I’ve been surprised at the way fairly traditional companies have embraced the cloud — but don’t always embrace the benefits. For most, the payoff has been relatively small and confined to the infrastructure layer. The thing is, most of the benefits of IaaS (infrastructure as a service) have already been realized through virtualization, which during the last decade cut costs through the infrastructure equivalent of Conway’s law.

Every department wanted its own server or, worse, its own server farm. Virtualization provided those departments with the illusion of dedicated infrastructure, while at the same time enabling management to pool resources and centralize IT operations…

This resulted in some great cost savings. Granted, the software was expensive — I frequently heard people report that a VM cost 80 percent of its "metal" equivalent — but those figures usually didn’t count the ancillary costs. It was a pretty good deal…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/the-bare-bones-cloud-why-bother-226172