I tell people that the cloud starts at the bottom of the IT stack — on the infrastructure that is the backbone of the cloud. I’m going to explore this concept in my next two posts.

I’ll be curious to hear your thoughts on it, so let me dive right in:

What do clients mostly care about “in the cloud”? At the end of the day, it is the application workloads that they can run. It is functionality hosted in the back end and delivered ubiquitously over the Internet that enterprises and end-users alike want to consume.

Rapid elasticity up and down, pay per use with no onerous commercial terms or up front investments have mesmerized the market and fueled a hype bubble that is unmatched in my 20 years in the industry. Read more