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Cloud Computing – we need more information

I have followed with interest a number of comments about the reliability of Cloud Computing, based on the actual, or perceived, problems with service from Google and Amazon. Of course there are some real incidents that have caused outrage, (my definition of the rage one experiences from a system ‘outage’), but are failures in ‘best endeavours’ mail services such as Gmail really the basis for considering the risks and rewards for Cloud Computing? May be not, but more serious was the outage of Amazon S3 storage service Sunday July 20th. This was the second outage from a respected leader who is selling cloud capacity as a service.

Amazon is well respected for its technology capabilities so this was a shock especially as a month or so before they had apparently been blaming problems on their ‘complicated systems’, but then for Google to have had a whole series of issues in the mid august period that affected some of their other services too. Taken as a whole against total system down time the figures aren’t that bad, but it does rather attract your attention when thinking seriously about the topic and its role in Enterprise services over the coming couple of years.

When you think about it carefully your realise that there are a lot of unknowns in what happens as there are an increasing number of variables that you don’t see in a simple SaaS, or Enterprise service. On this basis it makes you wonder how Microsoft will get on with their online small business service. My guess is that this is built around a more controlled environment, but as a full enterprise service on which those small businesses who sign up for it will rely I hope this is true. This looks like one place to watch progress carefully, along with the eye I have been keeping on SalesForce.com.

The real moves I want to keep an eye on are the tie up between the big boys Intel, HP, Yahoo and some good academic computing centres with the aim of building a really large scale test bed for testing and experimenting with Cloud Computing. The challenge with Cloud Computing is that the ‘business case’ is compelling, and I don’t just mean costs, I mean as a method to deliver the kind of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Business Technology solutions that offer some real new business value.

Many of these solutions will eventually require ‘Orchestration’ between services to take place in a Cloud Computing environment. Put another way the environment will be expected to support a lot of previously untried combinations of activities on the basis that all of them subscribe to the same common principles. Right now, you couldn’t say that we have those principles well enough defined for this to have a sporting chance. That’s what interests me about this project and its trials.

After all Virtuality looked a pretty simple trick, so who would have guessed that when it moved into the real mass market even a leader like VMware would get caught out. If you haven’t heard they have a clock drift problem that means time stamping within an application can drift off. Pretty critical in trading applications in the financial sector! It’s the small things that matter in all of these approaches!!

Posted by Andy Mulholland on September 10, 2008 | Digg this | Seed Newsvine

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# on September 12, 2008 8:26 AM, Nikhil Nulkar said:

Thanks for the post, Andy! I had been hearing about Cloud Computing for sometime now and in our recently concluded BarCamp at Capgemini Bangalore, we had one of the sessions where we discussed Cloud Computing.
It was the first time I really got into this subject. It sounds very interesting with the kind of benefits Virtualization can bring in especially for the SMBs. There were a lot of queries that were an off-shoot of this, such as:
1)how does the pricing/costing work for serivces such as the ones Amazon provides?
2)what is the difference(or similarity) between Cloud Computing and Virtualization?
Thanks,
Nikhil

# on September 12, 2008 9:53 AM, Andy Mulholland said:

Hi Nikhil

I will reply seperately on pricing etc, but one point that has come up from this post and other directions is there seems to be an emphasis on seeing the Cloud as an infrastructural provisioning service. This may well be because a number of bigger technology vendors see it as the logical way to change their product centric (hardware and software) business into a true 'services' business and have therefore driven a lot of the debate.

It is critical to realise that the Cloud extends above this to include the development and delivery of business platforms and business services constructed uniquely for a particular business. Virtualisation is limited to being a technique for use in the lower layer and does not embrace the range of things that cloud computing covers. In total it is a model so called Internet / Web based computing covering all the elements.

andy

# on September 12, 2008 5:54 PM, Mark Kerr said:

Interesting post, Andy. It seems that even the Gartner Hype curve is accelerating today - Is Cloud reaching the trough of disillusionment even before it hits the peak of inflated expectations?
I agree that real innovation here may come from tie ups between academia, Web2.0 players and major IT players - see http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20071008_ibm_univ.html for another example.
While I don't expect major 'mission critical' enterprise applications to run on the cloud in the near future, there are a couple of near term 'sweet spots' for cloud.
Application development and test is one such, and providing low cost, shared infrastructure (and applications!) in the developing world is another. An example that combines both is the Cloud Center IBM has built for the Wuxi Tai Hu New Town Science and Education Industrial Park in Wuxi, China.
Maybe in the same way that the developing world adopted mobile phones massively and more or less abandoned building out fixed line telecoms infrastructure, perhaps Cloud will be the dominant mode of IT delivery for these countries, with traditional 'enterprise data centers' never getting a foothold?

# on September 12, 2008 6:25 PM, andy mulholland said:

As you say Mark it will all have to start with the basic capability to share computational tasks and support the increasingly variable loading that we are all seeing becoming the norm. So in agreement with your point.

So also good to get the link from you in support of this.

My onw goal was to 'open up' the topic by starting with a broader understanding of the entire issue as i hope this makes the case for understanding that hype or no it will be a fundermental building block!

andy

# on September 16, 2008 7:42 PM, Gopal Padinjaruveetil said:

There is no doubt that this (Cloud Computing) is a game changing emerging technology, by breaking the entry barriers for hosting high power compute applications on the web for innovative new players and for enterprises that are willing to be early adopters

Here are some of the attributes of Cloud Computing

Abstract Resource
Focus on your needs, not on hardware specs.

On-demand Provisioning
Ask for what you need, exactly when you need it.

Large Scale
Cloud is conceptually of infinite capacity.

No Up-front Hardware Investment
Costs are in direct proportion to actual usage.

Cost-Effective & Efficient
No investment in depreciating hardware

There are some very good compelling success stories with the Amazon Cloud computing

The Enterprise usage of the cloud computing may be a slow starter, but it has already shown great promise for new startups and small companies/individuals with great ideas to host high power compute applications on the web without having a single server

See
http://animoto.com/

They started with 50 server instances on EC2 and the moment they made this a Facebook App their usage shot through the roof and they were able to scale to 5000 server instances in a day. These kind of applications/scalability would never have been possible without cloud computing

New York Times uploaded scanned images of their archived new papers from 1850 -1920 (almost 1TB of data) over a weekend to Amazon’s S3 (someone in NY Times using his personal credit card for $300), again this would never have been possible but for infinite cloud capacity

http://timesmachine.nytimes.com.

The Washington Post used Amazon EC2 to turn Hillary Clinton's White House schedule (17,481 non-searchable PDF pages) into a searchable database within 24 hours.

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/2008/clinton-schedule/?

MSNBC used EC2 to stream 2008 Beijing Olympics to Mobile phone users.
http://m.nbcolympics.com/

As with any new technology fad this is not a solution for all infrastructure needs.

But I think this could be a good option for enterprises that has elastic needs (seasonal peaks and planned spikes) without having to invest in additional idle capacities.

For enterprise video streaming and digital marketing.

There are lots of concerns/risks that need to be addressed before this will become enterprise mainstream. And also I agree with Andy we need to see where the major players like HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft will take this emerging technology in the near future.

Here are some potential use cases and their implementations on Amazon Web services

Backup / Archive
Examples: JungleDisk, ElephantDrive, SecoBackup, Zmanda.

Media Sharing
Examples: SmugMug, Jamglue, Anywhere.fm, Vimeo.

Media Distribution
Examples: Linden Lab (Second Life), BigFishGames, Advection.

Academic Computing
Examples: RunBlast, Hadoop, Condor

Quantitative Trading Analysis
Nasdaq

Media Rendering
Examples: Justin.tv, Animoto, Mogulus

Search Engines
Examples: TinEye

Social Networking
Examples: Renkoo

I met Dr. Werner Vogels CTO Amazon yesterday
and he gave his insight into where Amazon is going with this and their journey to reach here.

Regards

Gopal Padinjaruveetil

# on September 17, 2008 2:44 PM, andy mulholland said:

Hi Gopal

A highly informative post - many thanks!!

You have really developed the use of Clouds as a way to tap into more compute power on an as and when needed resource, and it certainly is allready making its mark in these areas.

I will be coming back to the topic in coming posts as i believe we need to have a much better appreciation of the 'to be' form of Clouds when we are making full use of them as a new environment to support how we do business in and with other businesses.

What is on my mind about this is to go back to the lessons of the PC and Networks era. A lot of good use was made of PCs and Networks in terms of immediate requirements for 'localised' and 'pesonalised' computing power but the real point was a technology sea change to an whole new era - IT. too many of these early successes then turned to failures as they couldnt support the real change.

as we enter a new era of Business Technology i dont want to see this happen again !!

andy

# on January 20, 2010 9:47 AM, Alfred_Sam said:

Cloud computing provides a various types of services for the internet users. Cloud computing is also closely related to virtualization which is also showing tremendous growth. Have anyone heard of cloud computing conference. I attended the conference from http:/cloudslam10.com. I gathered more information about the cloud computing from the conference. It was more helpful for me.

# on January 20, 2010 4:22 PM, andy mulholland said:

Thanks Sam - good steer towards the interesting Cloud Slams. these are virtual events that are therefore easy to understand. the first one was March 2009 and the net one will be 23 to 25th March 2010. follow the url that Sam sent us to find out more.