I am a big fan of cloud computing. It is a giant trend that was very easy to spot from a long time ago, but I was never quite sure exactly "when it's here".
For me, I think that day is today.
I just got done trying out SpringSource's Cloud Foundry. It's basically a way to easily deploy web applications on a Spring/Java/Tomcat/Apache/MySQL platform on Amazon EC2. And you know what? It freaking works!
As a Java developer, this is what I wanted -- a really easy point-and-click web interface to deploy a distributed Java application on the cloud. I don't have to worry about all of the boring systems plumbing. (and this comes from a guy who kinda likes the boring systems plumbing!). As a developer, I just want a platform that can scale effortlessly and cheaply.
Sure... Cloud Foundry has all sorts of issues: limited DB support, limited configuration, no elastic block storage, etc. But for a first release, I think the Spring Source folks shows what the future could be like for developers.
Cloud Foundry isn't the only cloud solution out there, but it's the one I care about as a Java developer, since java/tomcat/spring apps are what I write. And let's face it: Google's App Engine for Java just sucked.
I really do see computing as a utility. And I really hope to see scalable computing systems with full software stacks to become a utility as well. I think it could usher in a whole new wave of developer innovation. When you lower the bar for the deployment of scalable applications (and you make it really cheap), you start to invite a whole new segment of developers with interesting ideas and interesting solutions.
The next 10 years are going to be cool.
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