Vint Cerf has a great title at Google - Chief Internet Evangelist. But he has another good one as well - the Father of the Internet. He was responsible for many of the early internet developments, including TCP/IP, and it's always an honour to hear him speak. He did a Q and A session for us on Monday, and spoke positively about cloud developments. Some points from the various answers he gave to questions:
The world of the cloud is more than reliability and scalability, it's about taking media that so far has been distinct (eg audio, video, text, mail) and delivering it in different ways. Now we can create complex digital objects using technologies such as mash ups. One of the problmes with any digital object is will we have the technology to read it in the future (the bit rot problem). Cloud may help with this.
Do we run the risk of creating propriatry clouds that can't talk to each other? Yes, but we mustn't. We have to find a way eg a networked virtual cloud. It's only as hard as inventing the internet, and that wasn't hard :-)
Storage is not a problem, it's cheap, it's getting stuff out ie finding it that will be the problem. He suggested putting pizza ovens at the top of the racks in the Google data centre as a second line of business but hey were worried the cheese might drip into the servers.....
He had some comments on security, particularly about the physical location of data which people get hung up about. If safe harbour is OK, then make all of the cloud safe harbour. To make cloud work we will have to redefine physical location.
As I said, an honour to hear him.
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