In the case of electricity, power is generated in a central station, placed on the grid and made availible in your home and office. If you want a breeze, you plug in a fan, it consumes the electricity and produces your desired result.

Now imagine a compute utility, a grid of servers in a data center. You’d like to run an application run that makes images availible on the web. You copy your application to the utility, where it runs, consuming CPU cycles and RAM. As a result your images are availible on the web just as you wanted.

The only difference is that the consumption actually happens where the commodity is generated rather than in your home or office, but that’s of little consequence.

IMHO what’s held back utility computing is that until recently it wasn’t possible to “copy an application” to the utility unless it was a simple single server app. Anything more complex was really reintegrating the app. That’s been conquered, and now it’s possible to move full-blown distributed apps between data centers in minutes.

I won’t pretend to know what utility computing will look like in five years, but I and a lot of others are betting a lot of time and money that you’ll be using it.

Recently Robert Anderson and David Anderson (who are not directly related) both posted about metaphors that made them angry. Robert’s angry about computing cycles | electricity. David was tweaked about home building | agile methodologies. (Hair splitt…