In a refreshingly bitter post at Tech Target, Carl Brooks wrote: “Apple iCloud is not cloud computing.”
Brooks went on: “You know what iCloud is? Streaming media. In other words, it’s a Web service. Not relevant to cloud; not even in the ballpark.”
But there are certainly some cloudy elements to iCloud. At the very least, it’s a software-as-a-service. It fulfills the cloud promise of providing anytime, anywhere access to data.
And what about the architecture? GigaOM’s Derrick Harris took a look at what we know so far. It’s interesting, but it’s hard to say at this point whether there’s anything particularly “cloudy” about it – how well it makes of use of virtualization, elastic provisioning resources.
Brooks, who is obviously suffering from a bit of cloud fatigue, wrote:
And you, IT person, grumpily reading this over your grumpy coffee and your grumpy keyboard, you have Apple to thank for turning the gas back on under the hype balloon. Now, when you talk about cloud to your CIO, CXO, manager or whomever, and their strange little face slowly lights up while they say, “Cloud? You mean like that Apple thing? My daughter has that…” and you have to explain it all over again, you will hate the words “cloud computing” even more.
So what do you think? Is iCloud actually cloud computing?
