RSSClouds are like onions
One of the things I love about disruptive technologies is all the layers involved. Just when you think you are getting a handle on what they mean, what the implications are for your business, some bright guy comes up with a whole new level of disruption or possibility they offer.
In this case, the technology is cloud computing, the bright guy is Phil Wainewright, and the new level of disruption is the venerable Service Level Agreement (SLA). As Phil points out here, the traditional SLA as an actual "level" of specified service isn't necessarily applicable or desirable when it comes to cloud services. Sure, sometimes and for some things, you want that traditional five nines of availability and performance. But other times, maybe you don't, and if not, why are you paying for it? This is one of the major objections to "private" clouds or even traditional self-provisioned data centers; you have always paid for the top level of service whether you needed it or not.
But if the inflexibility and unpredictability of those pre-determined specifications are part of the attraction of cloud computing, then why not adjust SLA policy level along with the services themselves?
This is one of those whack your forehead kinds of obvious adaptations that some people are probably already saying "Duh, we're already working on that" as they read this, but to me, it represents a glimpse of how alien the future of computing really might be. It's not about just picking up your virtual machine images and running them on someone else's hardware. It's about all the second order implications of even having the capability of doing that sort of thing in the first place.
