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What is cloud computing?

Gartner defines cloud computing as "a style of computing in which massively scalable ITrelated capabilities are provided 'as a service' using Internet technologies to multiple external customers." Beyond the Gartner definition, clouds are marked by self-service interfaces that let customers acquire resources at any time and get rid of them the instant they are no longer needed. The cloud is not really a technology by itself. Rather, it is an approach to building IT services that harnesses the rapidly increasing horsepower of servers as well as virtualization technologies that combine many servers into large computing pools and divide single servers into multiple virtual machines that can be spun up and powered down at will. Cloud computing has two major premises: 1. Software as a Service (aka "Saas" or "SaS") 2. Platform as a Service (aka "PaaS" or "PaS") Software and Platform as a Service describe the business model of users logging into a centralized hub to access their software products. Users open their files and software only while online, using only their web browser and passwords. It is similar to the idea of mainframe terminals, but cloud computing involves a much larger "cloud" (network) of processing computers at the center. SaaS/Cloud Example 1: instead of selling you a copy of Microsoft Word for $300, a cloud computing model would "rent" word processing software to you through the Internet for perhaps 5 dollars a month. You would not install any special software, nor would you be confined to your home machine to use this rented online product. You simply use your modern web browser to login from any web-enabled computer, and you can access your word processing documents in the same way that you would access your Gmail. SaaS/Cloud Example 2: your small car sales business would not spend thousands of dollars on a sales database. Instead, the company owners would "rent" access to a sophisticated online sales database, and all the car salesmen would access that information through their web-enabled computers or handhelds. SaaS/Cloud Example 3: you decide to start a health club in your hometown, and need computer tools for your receptionist, financial controller, 4 salespeople, 2 membership coordinators, and 3 personal trainers. But you do not want the headaches nor the cost of paying part-time IT staff to build and support those computer tools. Instead, you give all your health club staff access to the cloud of the Internet, and rent their office software online, which will be stored and supported somewhere in Arizona. You will not need any regular IT support staff then; you will just need occasional contract support to ensure that your hardware is maintained.

The

Benefits

of

SaaS/Cloud

Computing:

The primary benefit of cloud computing is reduced cost for everyone involved. Software vendors do not have to spend thousands of hours supporting users over the phone... they would simply maintain and repair a single central copy of the product online. Conversely, users wouldn't have to shell out the large up-front costs of fully purchasing word processing, spreadsheet, or other end user products. Users would instead pay nominal rental fees to access the large cntral copy. When was the cloud hosting concept started? "The concept of the 'cloud' comes from network architecture drawings of modern telephone systems and later the Internet. The early cloud service providers included Amazon Web Services, and Google, which uses it for Gmail and several other applications and services. "Today, cloud computing typically includes three main offerings (in order): SaaS (Software-as-a-Service). Delivers applications and end-user tools, such as ecommerce applications, and other brands like Google Apps and Salesforce.com. PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service). Provides pre-built technology frameworks and development tools, such as Engine Yard AppCloud or xCloud, Microsoft Azure, and Google App Engine. IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service). Enables computing, storage and network resources to be provisioned without owning physical devices. Example IaaS providers are Amazon Web Services and Terremark." The Downsides of Cloud Computing:

The risk of cloud computing is that the users must place a high level of trust into the online software vendors that they will not disrupt the service. In a way, the software vendor holds its customers "hostage" because all of their documentation and productivity is now in the vendor's hands. Security and protection of the file privacy becomes even more necessary, as the massive Internet is now part of the business network. When a 600-employee business switches to cloud computing, they must choose their software vendor carefully. There will be dramatically-reduced administration cost to use cloud computing software. But there will be an increase in the risks of service disruption, connectivity, and online security.

How is cloud computing different from utility, on-demand and grid computing? Cloud by its nature is "on-demand" and includes attributes previously associated with utility and grid models. Grid computing is the ability to harness large collections of independent compute resources to perform large tasks, and utility is metered consumption of IT services, says Kristof Kloeckner, the cloud computing software chief at IBM. The coming together of these attributes is making the cloud today's most "exciting IT delivery paradigm," he says. Fundamentally, the phrase cloud computing is interchangeable with utility computing, says Nicholas Carr, author of "The Big Switch" and "Does IT Matter?" The word "cloud" doesn't really communicate what cloud computing is, while the word "utility" at least offers a realworld analogy, he says. "However you want to deal with the semantics, I think grid computing, utility computing and cloud computing are all part of the same trend," Carr says. Carr is not alone in thinking cloud is not the best word to describe today's transition to Webbased IT delivery models. For the enterprise, cloud computing might best be viewed as a series of "online business services," says IDC analyst Frank Gens. What is a public cloud? Naturally, a public cloud is a service that anyone can tap into with a network connection and a credit card. "Public clouds are shared infrastructures with pay-as-you-go economics," explains Forrester analyst James Staten in an April report. "Public clouds are easily accessible, multitenant virtualized infrastructures that are managed via a self-service portal." What is a private cloud? A private cloud attempts to mimic the delivery models of public cloud vendors but does so entirely within the firewall for the benefit of an enterprise's users. A private cloud would be highly virtualized, stringing together mass quantities of IT infrastructure into one or a few easily managed logical resource pools. Like public clouds, delivery of private cloud services would typically be done through a Web interface with self-service and chargeback attributes. "Private clouds give you many of the benefits of cloud computing, but it's privately owned and managed, the access may be limited to your own enterprise or a section of your value chain," Kloeckner says. "It does drive efficiency, it does force standardization and best practices." The largest enterprises are interested in private clouds because public clouds are not yet scalable and reliable enough to justify transferring all of their IT resources to cloud vendors, Carr says. "A lot of this is a scale game," Carr says. "If you're General Electric, you've got an enormous amount of IT scale within your own company. And at this stage the smart thing for you to do is probably to rebuild your own internal IT around a cloud architecture because the public

cloud isn't of a scale at this point and of a reliability and everything where GE could say 'we're closing down all our data centers and moving to the cloud.'" Is cloud computing the same as software-as-a-service? You might say software-as-a-service kicked off the whole push toward cloud computing by demonstrating that IT services could be easily made available over the Web. While SaaS vendors originally did not use the word cloud to describe their offerings, analysts now consider SaaS to be one of several subsets of the cloud computing market. What types of services are available via the cloud computing model? Public cloud services are breaking down into three broad categories: software-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, and platform-as-a-service. SaaS is well known and consists of software applications delivered over the Web. Infrastructure-as-a-service refers to remotely accessible server and storage capacity, while platform-as-a-service is a compute-and-software platform that lets developers build and deploy Web applications on a hosted infrastructure. How do vendors charge for these services? SaaS vendors have long boasted of selling software on a pay-as-you-go, as-needed basis, preventing the kind of lock-in inherent in long-term licensing deals for on-premises software. Cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon are doing the same. For example, Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud charges for per-hour usage of virtualized server capacity. A small Linux server costs 10 cents an hour, while the largest Windows server costs $1.20 an hour. Storage clouds are priced similarly. Nirvanix's cloud storage platform has prices starting at 25 cents per gigabyte of storage each month, with additional charges for each upload and download. What types of applications can run in the cloud? Technically, you can put any application in the cloud. But that doesn't mean it's a good idea. For example, there's little reason to run a desktop disk defragmentation or systems analysis tool in the cloud, because you want the application sitting on the desktop, dedicated to the system with little to no latency, says Pund-IT analyst Charles King. More importantly, regulatory and compliance concerns prevent enterprises from putting certain applications in the cloud, particularly those involving sensitive customer data. IDC surveys show the top uses of the cloud as being IT management, collaboration, personal and business applications, application development and deployment, and server and storage capacity. Can applications move from one cloud to another? Yes, but that doesn't mean it will be easy. Services have popped up to move applications from one cloud platform to another (such as from Amazon to GoGrid) and from internal data centers to the cloud. But going forward, cloud vendors will have to adopt standards-based technologies in order to ensure true interoperability, according to several industry groups.

The recently released "Open Cloud Manifesto" supports interoperability of data and applications, while the Open Cloud Consortium is promoting open frameworks that will let clouds operated by different entities work seamlessly together. The goal is to move applications from one cloud to another without having to rewrite them. How does traditional software licensing apply in the cloud world? Vendors and customers alike are struggling with the question of how software licensing policies should be adapted to the cloud. Packaged software vendors require up-front payments, and make customers pay for 100% of the software's capabilities even if they use only 25% or 50%, Gens says. This model does not take advantage of the flexibility of cloud services. Oracle and IBM have devised equivalency tables that explain how their software is licensed for the Amazon cloud, but most observers seem to agree that software vendors haven't done enough to adapt their licensing to the cloud. The financial services company ING, which is examining many cloud services, has cited licensing as its biggest concern. "I haven't seen any vendor with flexibility in software licensing to match the flexibility of cloud providers," says ING's Alan Boehme, the company's senior vice president and head of IT strategy and enterprise architecture. "This is a tough one because it's a business model change. It could take quite some time." What types of service-level agreements are cloud vendors providing? Cloud vendors typically guarantee at least 99% uptime, but the ways in which that is calculated and enforced differ significantly. Amazon EC2 promises to make "commercially reasonable efforts" to ensure 99.95% uptime. But uptime is calculated on a yearly basis, so if Amazon falls below that percentage for just a week or a month, there's no penalty or service credit. GoGrid promises 100% uptime in its SLA. But as any lawyer points out, you have to pay attention to the legalese. GoGrid's SLA includes this difficult-to-interpret phrase: "Individual servers will deliver 100% uptime as monitored within the GoGrid network by GoGrid monitoring systems. Only failures due to known GoGrid problems in the hardware and hypervisor layers delivering individual servers constitute failures and so are not covered by this SLA." Attorney David Snead, who recently spoke about legal issues in cloud computing at SysCon's Cloud Computing Conference & Expo in New York City, says Amazon has significant downtime but makes it difficult for customers to obtain service credits. "Amazon won't stand behind its product," Snead said. "The reality is, they're not making any guarantees." How can I make sure my data is safe? Data safety in the cloud is not a trivial concern. Online storage vendors such as The Linkup

and Carbonite have lost data, and were unable to recover it for customers. Secondly, there is the danger that sensitive data could fall into the wrong hands. Before signing up with any cloud vendor, customers should demand information about data security practices, scrutinize SLAs, and make sure they have the ability to encrypt data both in transit and at rest. How can I make sure that my applications run with the same level of performance if I go with a cloud vendor? Before choosing a cloud vendor, do your due diligence by examining the SLA to understand what it guarantees and what it doesn't, and scour through any publicly accessible availability data. Amazon, for example, maintains a "Service Health Dashboard" that shows current and historical uptime status of its various services. There will always be some network latency with a cloud service, possibly making it slower than an application that runs in your local data center. But a new crop of third-party vendors are building services on top of the cloud to make sure applications can scale and perform well, such as RightScale. By and large, the performance hit related to latency "is pretty negligible these days," RightScale CTO Thorsten von Eicken. The largest enterprises are distributed throughout the country or world, he notes, so many users will experience a latency-caused performance hit whether an application is running in the cloud or in the corporate data center.

Who needs to setup a Private Cloud and Why? In our opinion, anyone providing hosted backup, web, data, communication, mail, messaging, storage, soft-switch and, or VoIP services can benefit even by setting up a small or minimalistic private cloud. Private clouds offer immediacy and elasticity in your own IT infrastructure. By setting up a private cloud, you can experience the uses of a secure cloud computing behind your firewall. Deploy workloads and have them running instantaneously. Grow or shrink computing capacity to meet the abrupt needs of your applications. Try or experiment with new applications without disrupting an existing setup and, or buying new hardware. Let us enamurate the diveristy of advantages a compatible private cloud can deliver: Deployment: Setup your initial minimalistic cloud infrastructure in minutes, you may add more nodes, devices and, or other resources as and when needed; current records stand at 25 minutes to have a private cloud running. Immediacy: Provides a self-service flexible IT capability that enables a rapid application deployment and testing environment. Elasticity: Applications can dynamically use more resources within the cloud when required ensuring needs of the users are met instantaneously. Compatibility: Using same technology and APIs as the dominant public cloud

offering, Amazon EC2, you can build your applications and, or virtual appliances to run on either platform. Busting: Overloaded applications running on your private cloud can expand to use resources from any compatible public cloud. Feasibility: Use commodity and, or existing hardware and network infrastructure to setup a 99.99% up-time cluster at quite a lower maintenance cost for maximizing the return on current investments. Greenness: Gives an ability to administrators for better hardware sizing, dramatically reducing the emission of greenhouse gases by reducing energy consumption and as a direct consequence, reducing the effects of global warming and, or waste of computing resources. Security: Sensitive data, customer records and trade secrets are kept behind a firewall on an in-house infrastructure, requiring fewer changes to existing governance, security and audit procedures. Freedom: Using Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, FreeBSD, NetBSD and, or Xens trusted, stable, lean operating system and F/OSS (Free/Open Source Software) frees you of signing restrictive and, or complex EULAs (End User License Agreements) and recurring annual or upgrading charges.

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