Cloudosophy

NEW:  British consultant and publisher Charles Brett has a new free form of his journal, called INSIGHT-SPECTRA.  I am pleased to tell you that I have an article, Cloudosophy, in the first issue.

Although it's a bit long for a blog post, I have included it here.  You may recognize some of the comments and charts from earlier blogs. 

You can get a free subscription to INSIGHT-SPECTRA by going to their site and filling out the form at the bottom of the page.

www.insight-spectra.com  

Brett’s former publication, SPECTRUM MIDDLEWARE was a well-respected journal and I was honored to occasionally write for it.  I’m hoping to continue that tradition in INSIGHT-SPECTRA.

CLOUDOSOPHY

To talk about Cloud Computing, it might help to first define it.  The difficulty is there is a vivid debate occurring about just that subject.

The notion of a cloud (as a technical concept) first appeared in communications.  Every diagram of networks, particularly multiple networks, was topped with a “cloud.”  The idea was that the cloud was beyond specific definition, but that it included everything that the network might need, and changed over time as technology and applications evolved. 

It was natural for the biggest and most pervasive network, the Internet, to come to be thought of as a cloud.

Cloud Computing takes the idea of processing-at-a-distance (not a new idea at all) and translates it to the world of the Internet.  Cloud Computing has its precedents in time shared computing, when in order to connect any remote user to the computing environment, expensive, secure physical connections had to be created.  In the Cloud Computing round, we substitute the Internet (with or without secure connectivity) for those specific physical connections.  This changes the equation enormously and makes access to the function of the Cloud ubiquitous. 

In the beginning it was easy.  We had some clouds.  They offered access to compute power and storage at a fee, usually per user per hour.  All the clouds were public, in the sense that anyone with money (or more realistically, a credit card) and an Internet connection could use Cloud Computing.  But the term Cloud Computing quickly stretched to include not just the processing offering, but other services, as well as applications (previously referred to as Software as a Service or SaaS) that the clouds enable.

Initially, I diagrammed this Cloud environment as a layer cake, adding first management and later an application integration layer (as yet largely unrealized).

Integration of Applications

SaaS Software

Management

Utility Computing  (Infrastructure)

 

But after a number of discussions with Michael Salsburg, a technical executive and architect at Unisys, I redesigned the “layer cake,” to more accurately represent the relationships between the various parts of the Cloud.  In this diagram, Management moves from the layer cake and becomes a vertical layer affecting all of the other parts.

                                                               

Management	Integration of Applications
	SaaS Software
	<------------------------------------------Management
	Utility Computing  (Infrastructure)

 

Personally, I felt it was crisper to refer to the infrastructure as the cloud and the applications as SaaS, or cloud-based software, or whatever.  But it’s clear that this argument is lost.  All of the things in the diagram above, singly and in combination, are not being referred to as “cloud” or “cloud computing.”

But nothing appealing remains static and unchanged and Cloud Computing quickly grew in multiple dimensions.

1.       Early Cloud Computing vendors like Amazon and Google added additional functions (often for additional fees) such as storage and development software.

2.       Additional vendors entered the marketplace, such as Rackspace and OpSource, each with its own focus, based on its previous experiences, customer demand, and strengths.

3.       Large customers who were interested in the idea of Cloud Computing, but unwilling to place their information in a shared environment, wondered if “private clouds” were possible. 

It is this interest in attracting enterprise business and providing additional security and privacy that has caused much of the controversy over the boundaries and definition of Cloud Computing.

Many Cloud Computing providers will now provide a “private” cloud for a customer, usually a large enterprise.  Until recently, this meant building a new physical data center around a cloud architecture (virtualized servers, flexibility in scaling up and down, and the ability to support (and connect) users in many geographies.   But it was entirely private and “owned” by the customer.  Ownership, of course, is a flexible concept itself.  IBM, for example, will build infrastructure, including private clouds, for customers and charge for them on a lease or lease-to-own basis as well as selling the new facility to the customer.  

Although access to this private cloud would normally be via a VPN over the Internet, the cloud was invisible and unavailable to anyone other than its owner and his invitees.  Scalability was limited to the resources of the private cloud and the customer was making an investment in capital infrastructure (or at least a commitment to it). 

Recently, several vendors (Amazon and OpSource, for example) have started offering “virtual private clouds” (or “private virtual clouds”).  In this case, the customer contracts with his cloud vendor to create a private cloud within the vendor’s larger public cloud.  Subject to contract terms, the customer can choose to scale his private cloud up and down, enjoying the capital infrastructure investments and larger resources of the vendor, rather than being limited to his individual organizational initiative.  From within the public cloud that enables his private virtual cloud, the customer could choose to interoperate with other clouds (or other web-based applications).

And there’s the controversy:  Is a private cloud a cloud at all?  Some claim that since a cloud, by definition,  offers the ability to buy compute power (and other capabilities and services) on demand, without the need to buy the infrastructure, a private cloud is by definition not a cloud at all.  These same debaters usually argue that a private virtual cloud is a cloud because it is simply a temporary (although temporary could be as long as the customer likes) piece of a public cloud, subject to scaling up and down, as any proper cloud computing offering is intended to do.

It’s this kind of debate that convinces me that Cloud Computing is still pretty immature.  Not that it doesn’t work; it does.  In fact, lots of customers are happily computing away in the cloud, for purposes as diverse as additional compute power, development and test environments of any required configuration, access to software more immediately and with fewer internal resource requirements than traditional, in-house implemented software, and the ability to create shared environments, outside the organizational firewall, where all kinds of workers (employees, contractors, suppliers, customers, and others) can collaborate.

Rather, we are all still testing the boundaries of exactly what we’d like Cloud Computing to be.  Vendors want to take advantage of a hot new marketing term; customers bring their normal expectations to a new technology:  they expect it to solve every problem.  Cloud Computing is no different than other technologies.  It can offer extraordinary and growing capabilities that will make it attractive to most business customers for some things.  But no technology will ever solve every problem and it is when the users recognize the boundaries of a new technology and routinely use it for its strengths that a technology begins to mature and be genuinely useful.

Comments

[cerebritis]

This changes the equation enormously and makes access to the function of the Cloud ubiquitous.

[Harry]

Cloud Computing is so important. Make you understand better. But i think still has much improvement to go. http://findmediafire.com

[buy playstation 3]

I used to work with charles brett YEARS ago.