Does Apple have rather large cloud ambitions?

Cloud computing is definitely the buzzword of the moment, extremely necessary to many software businesses and their delivery of easy-to-use software services over the internet, but also rather overhyped of late. It was refreshing to read an interesting piece in the CultOfMac blogsite from a few weeks about an amazingly large computing facility that Apple is constructing in North Carolina in the US. This story has now resurfaced among the bloggers in the last few hours and gaining visibility.

The facility, which apparently will be one of the largest such facilities in the world, as large as Microsoft's new Chicago facility, does seem to mean that Apple is looking to cloudize at least some of its services in the future. Rumors aside, this does show how the larger players seem to be gearing up to a future that's probably more cloud-based than not. Will Microsoft play catch up with Google in offering cloud-based Windows OS in this manner with Azure? Probably. Will Apple do the same? Known for their secrecy and protectiveness of brand and product development integrity, probably not to the same degree.

But the facility sizes mentioned do start to illustrate the amount of investment required to really provide economies of scale in this space. Those without the deep pockets - and the robust business models to power those deep pockets - will increasingly have to pack off part of their infrastructure to 3rd party cloud providers, and retain the core assets that would be most at risk in case of an (unlikely but finite risk of) catastrophic systemwide provider failure.

I mean, if even Google grid/cloud computing maestros can have increasingly common cloud blackouts as demand increases for their GMail/GoogleApps cloud services, then this scenario should be in the standard contingency handbook for the rest of us, and not to be dismissed just because it says "on-demand" and "unlimited" in the marketing blurb.

It seems that beyond the hype, the reality of cloud/on-demand computing is already here. It is no longer a heated debate over if, nor over when, but over the rather more pragmatic "what".