Table 1: Quick Preview of Top 10 Obstacles to and Opportunities for Growth of Cloud Computing.
Obstacle Opportunity
1 Availability of Service Use Multiple Cloud Providers; Use Elasticity to Prevent DDOS
2 Data Lock-In Standardize APIs; Compatible SW to enable Surge Computing
3 Data Confidentiality and Auditability Deploy Encryption, VLANs, Firewalls; Geographical Data Storage
4 Data Transfer Bottlenecks FedExing Disks; Data Backup/Archival; Higher BW Switches
5 Performance Unpredictability Improved VM Support; Flash Memory; Gang Schedule VMs
6 Scalable Storage Invent Scalable Store
7 Bugs in Large Distributed Systems Invent Debugger that relies on Distributed VMs
8 Scaling Quickly Invent Auto-Scaler that relies on ML; Snapshots for Conservation
9 Reputation Fate Sharing Offer reputation-guarding services like those for email
10 Software Licensing Pay-for-use licenses; Bulk use sales
hardware industry. At one time, leading hardware companies required a captive semiconductor fabrication facility,
and companies had to be large enough to afford to build and operate it economically. However, processing equipment
doubled in price every technology generation. A semiconductor fabrication line costs over $3B today, so only a handful
of major “merchant” companies with very high chip volumes, such as Intel and Samsung, can still justify owning and
operating their own fabrication lines. This motivated the rise of semiconductor foundries that build chips for others,
such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Foundries enable “fab-less” semiconductor chip
companies whose value is in innovative chip design: A company such as nVidia can now be successful in the chip
business without the capital, operational expenses, and risks associated with owning a state-of-the-art fabrication
line. Conversely, companies with fabrication lines can time-multiplex their use among the products of many fab-less
companies, to lower the risk of not having enough successful products to amortize operational costs. Similarly, the
advantages of the economy of scale and statistical multiplexing may ultimately lead to a handful of Cloud Computing
providers who can amortize the cost of their large datacenters over the products of many “datacenter-less” companies.
Cloud Computing has been talked about [10], blogged about [13, 25], written about [15, 37, 38] and been featured
in the title of workshops, conferences, and even magazines. Nevertheless, confusion remains about exactly what it is
and when it’s useful, causing Oracle’s CEO to vent his frustration:
The interesting thing about Cloud Computing is that we’ve redefined Cloud Computing to include ev-
erything that we already do. . . . I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of Cloud
Computing other than change the wording of some of our ads.
Larry Ellison, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, September 26, 2008
These remarks are echoed more mildly by Hewlett-Packard’s Vice President of European Software Sales:
A lot of people are jumping on the [cloud] bandwagon, but I have not heard two people say the same thing
about it. There are multiple definitions out there of “the cloud.”
Andy Isherwood, quoted in ZDnet News, December 11, 2008
Richard Stallman, known for his advocacy of “free software”, thinks Cloud Computing is a trap for users—if
applications and data are managed “in the cloud”, users might become dependent on proprietary systems whose costs
will escalate or whose terms of service might be changed unilaterally and adversely:
It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign. Somebody is saying this is
inevitable — and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it’s very likely to be a set of businesses
campaigning to make it true.
Richard Stallman, quoted in The Guardian, September 29, 2008
Our goal in this paper to clarify terms, provide simple formulas to quantify comparisons between of cloud and
conventional Computing, and identify the top technical and non-technical obstacles and opportunities of Cloud Com-
puting. Our view is shaped in part by working since 2005 in the UC Berkeley RAD Lab and in part as users of Amazon
Web Services since January 2008 in conducting our research and our teaching. The RAD Lab’s research agenda is to
invent technology that leverages machine learning to help automate the operation of datacenters for scalable Internet
services. We spent six months brainstorming about Cloud Computing, leading to this paper that tries to answer the
following questions:
3