When we try to use or promote technologies or technological paradigms we must start by digging up all the information about it. This is almost mandatory and it’s the basis of all the work done by the majority of us. The information obtained must help create a clear and broad view about the new field of work. And consequently, the resulting view would help create solutions, products or promotional work.

This is fundamental and without it you won’t be able to create solutions with the most basic feature – interoperability. Without it, we (IT members, entrepreneurs, etc) will also loose the ability to vertically scale up our ideas in our company, or even to be successful when trying to obtain clients, financing, etc. Furthermore, we end up loosing the ability to talk with each other.

Everything could be different when you are innovating or when you are creating products from scratch, but even here we must carefully try to open our solutions the most we can.

Despite the fact that for most people the soul of a business is to be secretive, especially in the IT area, I would have to say that nowadays openness is the true soul of a successful business.

On complex and very recent and innovative paradigms like Cloud Computing the efforts to catch the most exact definition, or even the whole concepts and technologies involved are something very hard to achieve. This work is even harder if we refuse to accept that some parts of the Cloud Computing paradigm have to pay credit to the work developed by others. It would be more efficient, and we would have more and quicker results, if we try to integrate these other works, instead of ignoring them, or trying to reinvent the wheel over and a over.

Statements like “SOA is dead”, “Cloud is hot and Grid is not”, “EaaS – Everything as a Service, the next buzz word” are, in my perspective, not acceptable. I could understand if some of these statements are used to obtain attention or to radically shift the focus to some personal interest. In some perspective, it could be considered that I’m doing exactly the same when I decided to use the “EaaS – The next big buzzword” as the title to my text. But you can rest your thoughts: I’m not here to create a new buzzword. My point is that SOA is not dead, it can be used as the CORE of the Cloud, as a great number of Cloud providers are already doing. Grid is definitely not cold, it is and it will continue to be a way for researchers to obtain CPU and calculus power. And finally, EaaS – Everything as a Service, doesn’t exist and it won’t need to. We already have: IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service, PaaS – Platform as a Service, and finally, SaaS – Sofware as a Service.

For more detailed reading please view the excellent presentation done by Wayne Horkan, he explained in a clear way how this EaaS thing is layered. As I already have said, most of all, what Cloud Computing paradigm adds is the great feature of concentrating everything in a articulated and integrated way.

[update:2009/03/26]

Greg Pfister also have talked on these ideas on his blog, please read his toughs here:

http://perilsofparallel.blogspot.com/2009/02/is-cloud-computing-just-everything-aas.html