Cloud Computing Service: A Basic Introduction - 1

A few days back I posted an article on Top 10 Cloud Computing Service Providers. Many readers
asked what is Cloud Computing? Why is there so much buzz about Cloud Computing in the techindustry? Why is its definition so fuzzy?
I believe we understand better with examples and practical scenarios. These scenarios may help you
in understanding what is Cloud Computing and how it may help your business. Also, please note, this
is an introduction and cloud computing is indeed much more than what is discussed here in this
article series.

[Updated on Nov 29, 2011]

August 2008, United States of America
At the end of August [2008], as Hurricane Gustav threatened the coast of Texas, the Obama
campaign called the Red Cross to say it would be routing donations to it via the Red Cross home
page. Get your servers readyour guys can be pretty nuts, Team Obama said. Sure, sure, whatever,
the Red Cross responded. Weve been through 9/11, Katrina, we can handle it. The surge of Obama
dollars crashed the Red Cross website in less than 15 minutes.
Newsweek
Feb. 21, 2011. During ICC Cricket World Cup, India
Furious cricket fans slammed organizers of the World Cup on Monday as the official ticketing website
crashed amid a scramble for 1,000 tickets available for the final
---The Economic Times [Source]

The official ICC partner for online ticket sell, Kyazoonga, posted the following message on its
Facebook Fan Page and other social networks.
We are facing absolutely unprecedented amounts of traffic from all over the world, with hundreds of
millions of people hitting at once. Some of you may have trouble accessing the site. It seems that
cricket fever has surpassed all anticipations and expectations. Please bear with us as our global
network team works on bringing you the tickets you all have been waiting for.
--- Kyazoonga FB Page
June 2009, China
A Chinese website set up so people can inform on corrupt officials has been inundated with so many
visitors that it crashed shortly after launching.
---BBC
Perhaps this example made you smile, or perhaps you are equally worried as well, regarding the
level of corruption! No need to worry, because this also signifies a huge number of proactive citizens
willing to report it. Look on the bright side.
Everyday 8:00AM to 9:00AM, Since ? Till Date, Online Ticket Booking - IRCTC, India
The bookings & enquiry requests are 6-7 times higher during the peak hours than the rest of the
day. So while the existing infrastructure is well equipped to handle the daylong traffic, it is the peak
hour traffic that clogs servers
---What IRCTC can Learn from redBus Cloud Implementation?
May 2009, India
The worlds largest democracy, 1 billion+ population, goes to the jumbo general election. The
election commission unveiled a brand new website for providing real time results of the mega-poll.
It showed off arrangements which indicated it was well prepared to handle 80.64 billion hits in 8
hours (2,800 hits/second). Obviously a decent number by any standard.
Guess what happened?
On the election result day media reported:
300,000 hits/second make Election Commission website crash.
This per second hit rate means 8.64 trillion hits in 8 hours. Is it less than Googles hit/second? Take a
guess.
Similar server crashes were reported across India during the online CAT examination conducted by
prestigious IIMs (Indian Institute of Management) in November/December 2009, though they were
smartly attributed to a virus and not to the number of hits.
October 2009, France

A website launched by French first lady Carla Bruni has crashed on its first day - overwhelmed by the
number of users trying to access it at once.
---BBC
Online mob. Wish I was even half as popular as her!
What inference can we draw from above server crashes/failures?
These examples of server crashes are but a few among the hundreds happening almost everywhere
in the world on a regular basis. What does this indicate? Just one conclusion and that is:
The situation can only get worse. Currently, only 25% of world population, i.e., approximately 1.75
billion people have Internet access. Compared to Television and other mass media, its still
considered an elite medium of communication. If this meager Internet penetration has lead to a
significant number of crashes, what will happen when the Internet becomes a mass medium? India
and China currently have approximately 15% or less Internet penetration. Even a moderate increase
in Internet penetration and usage, say to 50%, will add more than a billion Internet users! Definitely,
too many clicks to handle. Going by statistics and backed up by almost double digit GDP growths,
they are soon going to add to this number.
Whats the solution to prevent the above scenarios?
Most of you will answer:
Add more servers to balance the load (load-balancing)
But will adding more servers solve the problem, or compound the problems of
companies/organizations that are already on a tight budget?
Moreover, how many servers do you think will be enough to handle that kind of traffic? Take a
guess. 100? 1000?
Before you guess, let me provide some facts to help you make a wise guess.
Facebook uses 30,000 servers! (as of October, 2009) and its adding capacity on a daily basis.
Sounds weird.
An unofficial estimate predicts the number of Google servers to be an incredible 1 million in its
world wide data centers!
The websites discussed above are not as big as Facebook or Google but their spike in traffic on that
particular day may had beaten these giants! Given these kind of stats, in order to purchase the
necessary number of servers, the organizations/entities involved will fork out enough money to
make them eligible to file bankruptcy protection.
So, wheres the catch? Even if they are financially sound enough to add huge numbers of servers,
just remember the following from our above scenarios/case study:

 The Red Cross will get this exponential surge in the number of hits once in a decade or maybe we
dont know when (i.e., only when there is a natural calamity of larger scale)
The Indian election commission website will attract visitors only when theres an election. i.e.,
ideally once in 5 yrs (forget regional elections, they dont attract much traffic).
The Chinese corruption website traffic would have gradually reduced to a normal level in a month
or so.
Carla Brunis fans would have mobbed her website only for a week or so.
The above description clearly shows the following trend:
Most of the traffic spikes are predictable and can be planned for. Even the Red Cross traffic surge
was predictable, but youve got less time to react and plan for it. So adding thousands of servers to
handle a few days or seasonal spikes in traffic is a humongous waste of resources.
So, what do you think is the best solution? Do share your views.
Stay tuned to Techno-Pulse for the 2nd part of this article on Cloud Computing Introduction 2,
well analyze further and find the best solution.

Cloud Computing: A Basic Introduction - 2

This article is part - 2 of the Cloud Computing Introduction series. To follow this article and understand the scenario
based discussion, you are advised to readCloud Computing Service: A Basic Introduction 1.
At the end of the previous article I had pointed out something very important, briefly discussed below.
The Scenario
The organization/entity discussed will have a spike in traffic on some particular day or days, i.e., the spike is a bit
seasonal in nature. They need a large number of servers to meet that kind of traffic, perhaps 1000 times more than
what they would need during normal days, yet its not advisable to buy and amass a large number of servers and put
them on standby to be used only on those heavy traffic days. This would be a sheer waste of valuable resources.
Moreover, only an astrologer can predict when your business will pick up and youll need 1000 times more
infrastructure/server than you needed in your last quarter! The reverse can also happen, i.e., a recession can strike
again and you may need to reduce your infrastructure drastically, because you dont need it until the government
announces a billion $$$ bailout!
In technical terms the competition and economics has lead to a scenario where a business needs the following when it
comes to computing as a whole:
Dynamism
Abstraction
Resource sharing
Note: Curious to know how the above concepts are practically implemented? Read:

5 Essential Attributes of a Cloud Service

Is Multi-Tenancy an Essential Attribute of Cloud Computing Service?
Dynamism: Its quite simple, something like the way you use your mobile phone connection. If you want to talk
more, youll buy a top-up card (if you are a pre-paid customer like me). If you are a post-paid customer youll change
your plan to meet your requirement. Your need is dynamic, so should be your infrastructure to support the changing
needs.

Abstraction: From an end users perspective, they dont need to care for the OS, the plug-ins, web security or the
software platform. Everything should be in place without any worry. The business/consumer should focus more on its
core competency rather than worrying about the OS and Software.
Resource Sharing: The whole architecture should be implemented in such a way that provides you the flexibility to
share applications as well as other network resources (hardware etc). This will lead to a need based flexible
architecture where the resources will expand or contract without any major configuration changes.
The Solution
Theres one model or style of computing (Gartner's phrase) which satisfies the three requirements mentioned above,
and is becoming the technology trend of future. Its known as Cloud Computing. Let me ask you a simple question.
Have you ever used Cloud Computing? Most of you will answer in the negative. Maybe youve been hearing the
Cloud Computing buzz from the last few months, but you dont think it has anything to do with you.
But if you are reading this page I can assume that you are web savvy enough to have an e-mail account. Thats it. You
are already on the cloud. An e-mail (Not all e-mail services are cloud based; a few viz. Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail are
cloud based) can be the simplest example of an SaaS (Software as a Service). SaaS is a subset of Cloud Computing.
There are various definitions of Cloud computing floating on the web. I found the following to the point and simple:
Common, Location-independent, Online Utility that is available onDemand
--- (Chan, 2009)
The following self explanatory figure describes the fundamental elements ofCloud Computing.

Image Credit, Based on Rayport and Heyward (2009, P4).

Need Based, Real Time Scale Up or Scale Down
So, how is Cloud Computing going to help the entities mentioned in our last articles examples? The simple solution
is IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). The entities (website owners, in our scenario) can simply use the services of a
specialist IaaS cloud provider viz.: Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid. This model works just like an electricity
subscription, in the old days, or a mobile phone or internet usage subscription in modern times. So
its subscription based, or Pay-as-you-go. If your demand increases, simply ask your cloud provider to add more

infrastructure. Pay-as-you-go ensures youll never pay anything extra. This results in a happy customer, or, perhaps
more appropriately, a customer who is delighted to be saving money.
Your cloud service provider will provide you cloud servers, cloud storage, reliable network and load-balancers ondemand to build and scale up or down your cloud computing infrastructure in real time. Moreover, I scanned through
a few SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and I must say they are simply outstanding.

GoGrid SLA offers 100% uptime, free 24x7x365 support (at no additional cost)
Amazon S3 SLA offers at least 99.9% Uptime during any monthly billing cycle

Many of them will also offer free Anti-Virus, managed DNS, Hardware Load-balancer and DoS protection. What else
do you want? The cloud war is getting more intense every day, with the entry of tech-giants viz. Microsoft and IBM.
Google is already there.
Simply focus on your core business, rest assured and leave everything else to the specialist who knows how to manage
it best.
Stay tuned, the journey of Cloud Computing has just begun
Happy Cloud Computing.