The Cloud: Before we knew what we were doing..

I am going to take a moment, though I might have touched on this and will again, to discuss what is about to occur. Obviously I can draw myself into a tangent on where we are in the complete realm of technology. It is easy. For a moment of nostalgia, I just put in The Matrix to remember what the long nights were about.

Those nights were about the quest. What quest? In retrospect I cannot remember the passion of the night. I remember the days when we didn't have all of the technology we do today. Kind of like the dawn of the DVD's. There were many nights where the gentle glow of the monitor, the Matrix and A Perfect Circle was all I had (that and alot of coffee).

Those nights, with the stimulus of the background ambiance, were the true creative moments. We existed in a zone few know. The conscious state of the mind clamoring at sleep while the endorphins of the mind were stimulating the very state of the euphoria we existed in. The absolute zone. We created.

We pushed Linux to knew levels. We were pushing security of the systems. Making each a fortress upon itself. Collapsing the perimeters of poorly configured systems and pulling the network behind secure infrastructure. Each day watching the technology change.

Then I would look up and spend a moment in the Matrix. How could something make so much sense. I remember the song by Pearl Jam... "Do the Evolution". What a mind job. Is that what we were doing. Honestly... we all know it. We were building the dawn of the next generation.

The nights carried on. The quests evolved. Technology grew exponentially; not just in the hardware of the desktop. But the laptops, networks, security, knowledge and anything technological went through a massive overhaul. We saw ebay grow up, Amazon evolve, Google become a dominance, Microsoft falling to paradigms they couldn't see, and YouTube. YouTube comes on the scene in 1995 and today accounts for 10% of all Internet traffic.

Why does all of it matter? It matters simply for this reason: We were the dawn of the day we sit in now. We provided the path. We provided the perimeter. We provided the networks. And now the Cloud.

This is the commoditization of a frontier never seen before. We aren't only connected to the system we are interconnected to each other. We took the red pill and we have no idea what the rabbit hole is doing to us.

As technologists, we have a new task... To build technology as a commodity. Mr. Nicholas Carr so eloquently outlined it in his book "From Edison to Google".

Where do I choose to focus.. Right on the edge of the cut. Bleeding profusely in a technological world I have no idea which way to turn (not really I do know).

It is here that we continue the evaluation of the cloud.

P.S. I took a moment to reflect. I will get back to the cloud discussion and some do's and don'ts.... Maybe we will even focus on the Private/Public discussion later.