Funny, I was just wondering about something this morning… then I check the latest tech news and sure enough there is an article similar to what I was thinking! So here it is… Cloud/grid computing is all the rage these days. In the current model you put your entire application in the cloud and run it from there. This is good for some things like web servers and databases, but not great for other things. Applications that don’t fit well into the current cloud model tend to be very rich UI focused applications; for example most of the applications you run on your desktop/laptop. However there is a subset of those desktop applications that at time require intense processing power, much more that your little desktop/laptop can provide. Examples of this include compiling code (VS.NET), transcoding audio/video, crazy Excel spreadsheets… What you really want is a local application experience but use the power of the cloud for the intense processing tasks. Imagine this; you are using VS.NET and TFS for a large enterprises system with several applications and databases. When you click rebuild all, it automatically puts your changes into a shelveset on the server, kicks off a server build (which leverages a huge CPU farm of build servers), then when done copies the outputs to your local machine. This would be great for huge systems! At Spot Runner it took 5+ minutes to rebuild the entire solution on the local developer machines. We had the choice of either upgrading 100 engineer’s systems to be more powerful (expensive) or leaving it be and paying the cost in developer productivity (more expensive). This would have solved both problems by giving faster rebuild times and allowing us to maximize the usage of our cap-ex server expenditure by centralizing it. There really isn’t anything stopping this from becoming reality. I could see a model both where the computing-cloud is internal to the corporate network or an external cloud (Amazon, Microsoft, Google…). I have to imagine these companies are already working on this. If you know anything about this, let me know!

http://techflash.com/seattle/2009/11/microsoft_juicing_up_excel.html