The strong cloud computing summit line-up continues after lunch with Jinesh Varia, Technology Evangelist, Amazon Web Services, Amazon.

What do large enterprises like about Cloud Computing?

Bit of a Nick Carr segue, businesses used to produce own electricity but didn’t add value to end product.  Same can be said of computing power.  Don’t need to generate computing power, and can get better economics and scale with external provider. 

Use only what you need.  Pay as you go model.

Value of time.  7-8 weeks from ordering to getting machine in place for development.  With the cloud, this can be accomplished in minutes.

On-demand provisioning through web services.  Software that creates and manages hardware.

AWS enabling Pluggable Cloud Architectures: compute (EC2), storage (S3 and SimpleDB), messaging, payment, distribution (caching at edge locations), scale (new services that sit on top of EC2 for load balancing, monitoring and auto scaling).

Is the cloud ready for the enterprise?  Essentially, Amazon cloud features list, including:

– elastic IP addresses

– availability zones

– new instance types (M1, C1)

– elastic block store and snapshots

– public datasets

– platforms – windows, open solaris, linux

– partners, ISVs, SIs etc

– security across offerings

– load balancing (new)

– monitoring (new)

– auto scaling (new)

So, of course “Yes”, the cloud is ready for the enterprise.

Some reference examples: Autodesk, Eli Lilly, ESPN (fan pages built on EC2, data on S3), another pharma doing protein calculations, NY Times and Washington Post.

“cloud computing is inevitable, it will get more mature in 2009, early move advantages to enterprises”.

Jinesh closes by asking “What would you like to do [in the cloud], but cannot?  Why?”  Sounds like an open call for requirements to me.