Günther Gerlach

written by gunther gerlach-2009

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 computing 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 computing 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.

Gunther Gerlach