De-coupled Cloud Runtime And Demand-based Pricing Suggest Second Wave Of Cloud Computing

A couple of days back Zoho announced that the applications created using Zoho Creator can now be deployed on the Google cloud. On the same day Google announced their tentative pricing scheme to buy resources on their cloud beyond the free daily quota. We seem to have entered into the second wave of the cloud computing.

Many on-demand application vendors, who rely on non-cloud based infrastructure, have struggled to be profitable since the infrastructure cost is way too high. These vendors still have value-based pricing for their SaaS portfolio and cannot pass on the high infrastructure cost to their customers. The first wave of the cloud computing provided a nice utility model to the
customers who wanted to SaaS up their applications without investing into the infrastructure and charge their customers a fixed subscription. As I observe the second wave of the cloud computing a couple of patterns have emerged.

Moving to the cloud, one piece at time: The vendors have started moving the runtime to a third party cloud while keeping the design time on their own cloud. Zoho Creator is a good example where you could use it to create applications using Zoho's infrastructure and then optionally use Google's cloud to run it and scale. Some vendors such as Coghead are already ahead in this game by keeping the both, design-time and run-time, on Amazon's cloud. Many design tools that have traditionally been on-premise might stay that way and could help the end users to run part of their code on the cloud or deploy the entire application on the cloud. Mathematica announced their integration with Amazon's cloud where you can design a problem on-premise and send it to the cloud to compute. Nick Carr calls it the cloud as a feature

Innovate with the demand-based pricing: As the cloud vendors become more and more creative about how their infrastructure is being utilized and introduce demand-based pricing, the customers can innovate around their consumption. Demand-based pricing for the cloud could allow the customers to schedule the non-real time tasks of the applications based on when the computing is cheap. This approach will also make the data centers green since the energy demand is now directly based on computing demand that is being managed by creative pricing. This is not new for the green advocates. The green advocates have long been pushing for a policy change to promote variable-pricing model for the utilities that would base price of electricity on the demand against a flat rate. The consumers can benefit by their appliances and smart meters negotiating with the smart grid to get the best pricing. The utilities can benefit by better predicting the demand and make the generation more efficient and green. I see synergies between the cloud and green IT.