One of the hottest terms out there these days appears to be cloud computing with everyone wanting to get in the act of setting up massive data centers to become the heart of these clouds. Right know probably the two biggest players in this rapidly emerging computing field has to be Google and Microsoft with Amazon not far behind given the popularity of their S3 and E3 services. This doesn’t even take into account players like IBM; who just announced a new data center project, EDS who is being bought up by HP or any number of other major data related corporations.

The Dominance

The other day I had a Discussion Point podcast where I talked about the idea of how the current operating system sectors were potentially being transplanted to this new cloud computing platform and the OS war along with them. Then today Hugh MacLeod from gapingvoid.com suggests that rather than a war per se we could end up with a single global company being the major force in the Cloud much like Microsoft on the Desktop or Google on the Web:

But nobody seems to be talking about Power Laws. Nobody’s saying that one day a single company may possibly emerge to dominate The Cloud, the way Google came to dominate Search, the way Microsoft came to dominate Software.

Monopoly issues aside, could you imagine such a company? We wouldn’t be talking about a multi-billion dollar business like today’s Microsoft or Google. We’re talking about something that could feasibly dwarf them. We’re potentially talking about a multi-trillion dollar company. Possibly the largest company to have ever existed.

I imagine my friends who work for the aforementioned companies know all this, and know how VAST the stakes are.

Windows vs Apple? Who cares? Kid’s stuff. There’s a much bigger game going on… And for some reason, its utter enormity seems to be a very well-kept secret.

While Hugh might be considering it a secret for now one has to wonder if indeed one company could end up being the major force – and which company; if it even currently exist, will it be. If computing history is any guideline to go by chances are Hugh could be right. Now whether that will be a good thing or not still remains to be seen.

The Cost

The main component of all cloud computing offering regardless of the company making them is massive data centers all around the world. companies like Google and Microsoft are spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year and there is no sign of them slowing down – if anything they will be increasing their spending. However there is another cost beyond the investments being made by the companies involved – one that could have far reaching effects in our changing world.

There is one common element that all data centers need that has nothing at all to do with storing data and that is the electrical power required to run these massive server farms. The folks over at Pingdom did some number crunching and the one usage example they gave and based on stats for 2005 the amount of power used by all US data centers at that time was enough to power five million houses. this figure doesn’t take into account either the other equipment involved – like the routers and such.

Since 2005; which really was only the early years of data centers being built on any huge scale, there has been an explosion of data center projects. It is this insatiable need for electricity that has Microsoft and Google building their data centers in remote areas that are close to current hydro electric installation and looking to even building their own. While this need for power not just to run the actual data centers but also to cool them has prompted these major player to also heavily invest in research about cooling these data monstrosities.

One has to wonder though with this increase desire to move us all to the cloud what is going to be the cost to our environment and is it worth the cost. Will this increasing push potentially endanger our power supply because of our dependency on computer? Have we really looked at the possible repercussions to our society if we hinge our future growth on clouds being propped up by a single source that could be vulnerable in so many different ways?

Conclusion

It is inevitable that cloud computing will become a primary platform in our computing world the questions that remain are who is going to control it and will our society be willing to pay for the possible ecological effects of our dependencies.

What do you think?