Günther Gerlach

written by gunther gerlach-2009

 

 

Cloud computing services span a wide scope, from virtualized low-level computing and storage to full business services. Understanding the spectrum of cloud services and the characteristics of each service category is essential in determining when, where, how and why to apply cloud computing.

 

Cloud Computing Infrastructure walkthrough

Virtual servers in the cloud model. Basically they are providing Infrastructure as service. If you need to run your application, you can go to their site, configure your own server with your required configuration and software libraries and they will generate a server on the fly for you! Basically all this magic has come about thanks to virtualization technologies which allow you to create software servers independent of the hardware infrastructure running them. These VMs can be scaled and migrated depending on the need.

The last generation of Compute Cloud is a suite of web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. The web service interface allows businesses to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides complete control of your computing resources. These resources need only minutes to obtain and boot new server instances, allowing a quick capacity escalation, both up and down, as your computing requirements change.

 Cloud has great potential in reducing the cost, increasing utilization and efficiency and simplifying maintenance. Cloud Computing, is a service that allows the user to ’switch’ on both processing capacity, and storage as required, like any other. New metrics like Giga-Hertz Hours are used for the pricing models.

 

The good

Infrastructure investment customers minimize capital expenditure; this lowers barriers to entry, as infrastructure is owned by the provider and does not need to be purchased for one-time or infrequent intensive computing tasks. Services are typically available to or specifically targeted to retail consumers and small businesses.

Location independence device and location independence enable users to access systems regardless of their location or what device they are using.

Multi-tenancy enables sharing of resources and costs among a large pool of users, allowing for:

        Centralization of infrastructure in areas with lower costs (such as real estate, electricity, etc.)

        Peak-load capacity increases (users need not engineer for highest possible load-levels)

        Utilization and efficiency improvements for systems that are often only 10-20% utilized.

On-demand allocation and de-allocation of CPU, storage and network bandwidth

Performance is monitored and consistent, but can suffer from insufficient bandwidth or high network load.

Reliability improves through the use of multiple redundant sites, which makes it suitable for business continuity and disaster recovery. Nonetheless, most major cloud computing services have suffered outages and IT and business managers are able to do little when they are affected.

Scalability meets changing user demands quickly without users having to engineer for peak loads.

Security typically improves due to centralization of data, increased security-focused resources, etc., but raises concerns about loss of control over certain sensitive data. Security is often as good as or better than traditional systems, in part because providers are able to devote shared resources that most customers cannot afford. Providers typically log accesses, but accessing the audit logs themselves can be difficult or impossible.

Sustainability comes about through improved resource utilization, more efficient systems, and carbon neutrality. Nonetheless, computers and associated infrastructure are major consumers of energy.

 

the biggest Concerns about this new technology

Control: When you give up the management of your infrastructure, you also give up control over it. This reduces your burden but also makes you anxious and vulnerable. Now you have to rely on the guarantees provided by the cloud vendor.

Security: This is the biggest concern as data is the most critical asset of a company. They don’t want to put it in any one else’s hand. Great assurances are required here by the service providers, otherwise they aren’t likely to succeed. Not every provider can afford that unless the industry finds a way to simplify this for them.

Dependability: Today a service provider exists, tomorrow they don’t. Companies cannot rely on such services. They need continuity.

 

The Players and their Challenges

Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows the imaging of servers and the use of web-services to provision these images on specified virtual platforms. It currently allows a range of basic, to intermediate, to high-performance spec’ed platforms and these are priced on an hourly basis.

Using the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) a complete application environment can be provisioned from the stored images in a short period of time, used for a defined purpose and period, and then decommissioned.

 

The main challenges that remain for Cloud Computing

Visibility: Give customers immediate (real-time) visibility into the availability and performance of the services that you are delivering to them.

 

Transparency: The performance and availability data needs to be freely available. Don’t hide these metrics behind a login or some complex credentials-only mechanism. Companies who use this rule will succeed, and they will set the standard and force the rest of the industry to follow.

Trust: Above all else, report accurately. The most important asset a cloud services provider has is its reputation. Customers will forgive a service disruption–we all know computer systems have their periodic hiccups. Customers will not forgive anything that is less than honest and forthcoming.

Persistence & Availability - The ability to continue working during outages or the ability to mitigate outages.

Privacy and National Security Concerns - The hosting of information outside of your country’s borders does concern Public Sector organizations. The US Patriot Act for example is a concern for some countries in adopting cloud services. It is thought that Country-siloed Clouds may be able to address this.

Geo-Political Information Management Concerns - The Political risk a country takes on by housing information for another country.

 

Attributes of Cloud Computing and Applications as a Service

        Elasticity and scalability

        Delivery as a service and service boundary serving as the abstraction layer,

        Ability to expose web services,

        Ability to stack one service onto another (e.g. a start-up on top of Amazon EC2),

        Being optimized for cloud environments with multitenancy and other techniques.

 

Layers of the Cloud

This new technology well known as cloud computing has a singular list of layers as is described here.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - basically raw compute and storage services such as Amazon’s EC2 (Gartner calls it: “System Infrastructure Services”.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) - higher-level development environments which abstract the underlying technology and provide for scalability and rapid application development such as Google App Engine or salesforce.com’s force.com.

Software as a Service (SaaS) - classical online software such as Gmail or salesforce.com (for Gartner, “Application Services”).

Information Services - services which process data like Feedburner or Yahoo RSS Feeds.

Business Process Services - like advertising and payroll.

Ecosystem Management and Security Services - various services not really providing stand-alone value but making other services usable for the enterprise, including management and security.

Enabling Technologies - not really publicly exposed services but underlying technology (hardware, OS, etc.) which helps the providers deliver their services.

 

An example

The following video is a pretty example of a small company who developed a heavy traffic and high processing consuming application. This company scaled from 50 server instances to 3,500 server instances after lunch in Facebook in less than a week. This application was fully implemented in the cloud of Amazon well known as Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud.

 

Cloud Computing Terminology

It seems that a whole new cloud computing vocabulary is rapidly emerging.

cloudburst The term cloudburst is being use in two meanings, negative and positive;

Cloudburst (negative): The failure of a cloud computing environment due to the inability to handle a spike in demand.

Cloudburst (positive): The dynamic deployment of a software application that runs on internal organizational compute resources to a public cloud to address a spike in demand.

Reference: “ISV virtual appliances should underpin a new surge in cloud use followed by self-service mechanisms and enterprise connectors enabling organizations to ‘cloudburst’ to using cloud services.

Related uses: Cloudbursting. Reference “In addition to direct sales to enterprises, going forward it hopes that extending out from private clouds to public ones – what we like to call ‘cloudbursting’ – will become a prevailing IT weather pattern and provide it with additional opportunities.

Cloudstorming: The act of connecting multiple cloud computing environments. …Zimory will be covering off the key cloudy marketplaces and activities: public cloud, internal cloud, cloudbursting (grow-over from internal to public clouds) and cloudstorming (connecting multiple clouds).

Vertical Cloud: A cloud computing environment optimized for use in a particular vertical — i.e., industry — or application use case. The verticalization of the cloud would provide marketing benefits,  while also providing a possible means of addressing issues of information security crucial to industries such as health care and financial services.

Private Cloud: A cloud computing-like environment within the boundaries of an organization and typically for its exclusive usage. It is these companies that have dramatically leveraged their internal and originally Private Cloud Computing infrastructures to significant economic benefit.

Internal Cloud: A cloud computing-like environment within the boundaries of an organization and typically available for exclusive use by said organization. With Cloud Computing becoming more and more popular, large corporations are likely to set up their own clouds and integrate them with external clouds, like Amazon EC2.

 

The good

Infrastructure investment customers minimize capital expenditure; this lowers barriers to entry, as

 

 

Conclusion

In summary, Cloud Computing is an inevitable evolutionary step for our industry, while it will likely be around 5 years before we see mainstream adoption, it is an area of the IT World that is worth keeping a watching brief upon, and some early experimentation, particularly for development environment purposes, would be well worth considering.

 

 

Gunther Gerlach