The world of cloud computing is a complicated place. But Lucas Carlson boils it down to a simple analogy: Amazon is the Apple of cloud computing.
With its enormously popular collection of web services — services where anyone can build and run their own online software without setting up their own hardware — Amazon is well out in front of the cloud computing competition, just as Apple was in the mobile game with those seminal creations, the iPhone and the iPad and the iOS mobile operating system.
What we need now, Carlson says, is an Android of cloud computing, something that can challenge Amazon in much the same way Google’s open source mobile operating system challenged Apple. Amazon Web Services are great, he explains, but much like the iPhone and the iPad, they’re controlled by a single company. What we need is a cloud computing substrate that can spread across the industry, a platform that frees the world from the whims of Amazon — and gives us the power to readily move our applications from cloud service to cloud service.
Read more at Wired.
