The key message of the Amazon CTO and VP Werner Vogels during his "State of the Cloud" address at GigaOm Structure 2010 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday was this: "Cloud is everywhere." Vogels was asked to deliver an overview of where cloud computing was a few years ago, where it is now and where it is going in the future. Amazon Web Services is one of the largest providers of public cloud services in the world.

Over the past year, he said, cloud computing has gone from something that was in early stages of deployment and testing by a few companies to an IT delivery model that can no longer be ignored.

"If there’s one thing that we changed … is that we went from talk to action," Vogels said. "Where many enterprises and many companies were kind of considering the cloud and doing small proof-of-concepts … we left that behind. There’s an enormous amount of action happening right now."

The pressure to adapt the various forms of cloud-based delivery models comes from business owners, who see the opportunity to save capital and from the IT departments themselves, who understand that they will be at a disadvantage in the future if they do not act right now.

One of the most significant shifts in thinking the cloud has brought along was the shift in the balance of power over decisions about technologies enterprises are deploying. "Enterprise licensing … is actually rapidly changing. Many of the traditional enterprise IT vendors are scared because they don’t know what the future is going to look like."

Today’s customers expect to have the power over enterprise IT, while before it was the vendors who dictated what technology enterprises would have.

Vogels mentioned the well-publicized endorsement of cloud computing by the US Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, who has been a major proponent of cloud computing and has instructed all federal agencies to look for ways to maximize their use of cloud computing to reduce cost.

On the cloud-provider infrastructure front, companies are racing to make their cloud infrastructure encompass as wide a geographical area as possible. Cloud customers expect to be able to run an application in Europe, for example, and also have the ability to deploy it in Asia, where it will run in the same way.

Some applications also require local data storage and Amazon is currently in the process of developing the infrastructure to move to a "more fine-grained model" to give its customers the ability to choose exactly where the data used by their cloud-based applications is stored.

Scalability demands on AWS infrastructure are enormous as well. Amazon S3, the provider’s cloud storage service, went from storing about 20bn objects in March of 2008 to between 100bn and 120bn objects in the first quarter of this year. The system’s current peak request frequency is more than 120,000 requests per second.

Amazon is also investing in increasing security of its cloud services, aiming to make its infrastructure more secure than a typical enterprise data center. "Cloud needs to raise the bar," Vogels said.