One of my favorite quotes from the book Fooled by Randomness is

Wittgenstein's Rule: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table, you may as well be using the table to measure the ruler.

I believe that we are in the very early phases of the migration of enterprise IT infrastructure into the cloud. Once it’s there, though, I expect that there will be a need to measure its consumption in a uniform way, regardless of whether it’s desktops, servers or data centers that are being purveyed. Simplistic metrics like time or compute cycles are unlikely to survive contact with cloud infrastructure that can conjure up customized stacks in real time from globally-distributed & heterogeneous resource pools.

Failing to come up with an appropriate yardstick could lead to hairy billing issues, savvy customers tinkering with clever arbitrage schemes and potentially the inability of cloud service providers to effectively predict how much to charge in order to cover their costs.

One candidate for such a universal metric is the Computing Resource Unit or “CRU”, developed by SatoriTech, a virtualization analytics startup. CRU is a quantitative measure of compute capacity calculated via an algorithmic approach that normalizes a wide range of input variables.

Unlike metrics that are simply a thin layer of code wrapped around a set of arbitrary “consultant-generated” frameworks, the patent-pending technology behind CRU is the product of multiple years of research and is currently deployed in some of the largest commercial & government institutions in Sweden, where it is used to measure & benchmark the efficiency of internal IT infrastructure.

I wonder what the impact of such a universal metric will be. Some would argue that it will commoditize IT and destroy value. But it's also plausible that the economies of scale that cloud service providers achieve would merely shift value in their favor and that of their end customers.