Picture: Science Photo Library / Rex Features

Often enough, I find myself explaining to people what this whole “cloud” thing is about. That’s a subject for another time, because it’s just complicated enough to be slightly tedious. More interesting is the conversation that comes immediately after that one: how can I start using this “cloud” thing?

At first blush, it’s easy enough. You just sign up and start using, right? Spin up a few instances, set up an app, configure an autoscaler and away you go! Hey, if you’ve got an unlimited amout of someone else’s money to work with, that might even be a good way to go about it.

The rest of us, including me, have to work within a budget. Buying a server and putting it in a colo may not be cheap, but the costs are pretty predictable. In the cloud, I just get a bill at the end of the month. There’s no predictability there! Not to mention that Finance is breathing down my neck about the bit where they no longer have control over what’s being spent on what. Makes them unhappy, and usually for good reason.

Maybe you’re like me, and would rather seek forgiveness than ask permission and occasionally do so in the form of an expense report. About eight months back, I was setting up my own copy of the full Cloudability development environment. This was a fairly involved procedure that relied in part upon having a reasonably beefy RDS instance running. After about two weeks of utility, I shut it all down, turned all the things off, and deleted all the data. Then I filed the expense report and forgot about it. A few weeks later, my boss notices the expense claim and wants to know what this is about and why he’s getting a surprise cloud expense claim.

Oops. I’m lucky he’s a forgiving sort.

Had I been thinking about it, I would have taken advantage of the then-beta Tribes functionality so that he could see my cloud spend as it accrued. Instead, it came as a surprise when he went over expense claims. It’s probably a good thing we didn’t have Finance then, or they’d have been breathing down my neck faster than you can say “audit”.

You’re smarter than me, though. You know that the cloud is pretty awesome, you just need to convince Finance to let you do it. So you show them this neat thing and how it lets them look over your shoulder at your spending. Three crazy days later you’re got a complex heroku-aws-pingdom-new relic-softlayer-sendgrid-akamai enterprise stack going and nobody has asked you any awkward questions about how much all this will cost them.

Just be careful with that autoscaler. You’ll put somebody’s inode out.

The tech world is a-buzz around the cloud. But a lot of that pontificating focuses on the current state of the cloud. What about next month, or next year?

On July 19th, we were fortunate enough to have Ben Kepes (@BenKepes), Krishnan “Krish” Subramanian (@Krishnan) and Alex Williams (@AlexWilliams) in our neck of the woods, and it seemed silly not to point a camera at them while they imparted some prophetic wisdom about the cloud, where it’s headed and what that will mean for the rest of us.

Topics include:

• Open clouds?
• Measuring your cloud
• Private clouds
• PaaS