Here’s a question that has come up a few times in the past few months:Â Will this “cloud” thing that’s
supposedly on the horizon eat up load balancing?
The cloud is this nebulous platform on which to build your web application. The idea of course is that companies don’t have to maintain/manage their own servers, network infrastucture, datacenters, etc.  And of course, load balancers.
If the cloud computing concept takes off, there’s the potential to really disrupt the sales of load balancers/ADCs. Instead of 100 companies buying load balancers and utilizing them at 20-50%, a few cloud computing providers could purchase a lot fewer load balancers and push the same amount of aggregrate traffic through consolidation and economies of scale. That all depends on how it plays out, of course.
The value market (SMB-oriented) won’t probably feel this. If the cloud takes off, it’ll probably be geared towards the enterprise first, and then trickle down to the SMBs.
But I’m not betting on the cloud just yet. We’ve seen this before with grid computing and companies like Loudcloud. From what I remember, the high degree of customization most enterprises emply seemed to negate most attempts at cloud computing.
Take American Airlines as an example. Let’s say they wanted to port themselves to the cloud. They’d have to have the cloud company either completely re-write their application on the cloud platform, or the cloud company would just take on the current platform (likely hardware, OS, and app platform and all). But that wouldn’t really be cloud computing. That would be hosting.
