Cloud computing: a new paradigm in the IT industry
As the IT field evolves and becomes more mature, the need to optimize costs naturally drives innovation and creativity. The new concept along with the technology, which is now making the rounds is ‘cloud computing’.
I ran into people with limited IT knowledge asking what ‘cloud computing’ is. Although I tried to explain them to the best of my ability, most of the time I end up with a blank stare from them, indicating that they did not understand the concept or background behind cloud computing.
What is cloud computing?
Recently, I started giving you home kitchen Vs restaurant examples to explain the concept behind ‘cloud computing’. A kitchen in the home is dedicated to the home, the resources, be it the vessels or the appliances, or the person cooking is dedicated to that home. The homeowner invests in the kitchen and reaps the benefit of having the kitchen for himself or herself or their family members. It is the owner of the house who has to maintain the kitchen. When one compares home cooking to restaurant cooking, the end goal is the same, which is the specific food on offer, but the way the food is prepared or served is different. One owns nothing in a restaurant except for the food it offers. Simply put, the same is the concept between the traditional IT offering and cloud computing.
Similar to home cooking, in the case of the traditional IT offering, the company owns the hardware and software licenses, and sometimes the company outsources application development to a third party, who is comparable to the contract chef ( if you are a rich person) to prepare food at home. . With the evolution of the IT sector in hardware and software, we are moving towards the ‘restaurant’ model of IT services; you only pay for what is your end goal: ‘processed food’ or ‘services’. Like in a restaurant, where you are only concerned with the quality of the food and the expected service and not much concerned with who the chef is, or the waiter, or the appliances, or even where the kitchen is, is the case with “online computing.” Cloud”. ‘, the customer is focused on the service offering and not on the hardware, software, raw data or resources used to provide the service offering or the final product.
Organizations are not going to jump into cloud computing, they will evolve and move towards cloud computing infrastructure features over a period of time as they feel confident about it. When it comes to cloud computing, I think we’re at a stage similar to the early 90s with regards to IT outsourcing. IT services were outsourced so the organization could focus on the ‘core’ business area; cloud computing could well be a step further.
Now, let’s look at the service models that are typically considered in cloud computing.
SAaS: Software – as – a service:
This model has been talked about for quite some time, business applications are hosted on servers maintained by data centers. Legal issues, security, integration and confidentiality of data of the conditions of this model at this time. Once policies, procedures, and standards are defined and refined over a period of time, they are likely to be adopted over a period of time.
In terms of use, the application is accessed through the web browser and the terms and conditions may be governed by service level agreements.
Possible examples could be anything from a simple free generic email service to a complex ERP system.
IaaS: Infrastructure – as – a service:
Computing servers, storage, hardware are considered under this service model. You would also find free storage offered on the web, this could be called IaaS.
PaaS: Platform – as – a service:
The development and deployment platform could be offered as a service to developers to build, deploy, and manage SAaS applications.
If you look at the cloud deployment strategy, it’s typically public, private, and hybrid clouds. I feel like the name itself is pretty meaningful in describing the type.
The next question is, what kind of hardware is required to host cloud computing?
At this time, cloud computing is typically implemented in the traditional model. By traditional model, I mean one could have a server to serve either the database tier or the application tier, which is almost a “silo” based model. But, since cloud computing, efficient hardware and manpower (see my restaurant example) is necessary to better manage cloud in a data center. This is where hardware could play a major role, new technology such as grid computing, real application clusters, automatic storage management, server scaling, and server virtualization features play an important role for better Cloud management and implementation.
As we move forward, we would very well be moving away from ‘Silos’ based computer system and application. The cloud computing infrastructure would reside in the data center, this would require efficient use of hardware and more manpower needed to support multiple servers or applications. Optimization and effective control would play a greater role in managing the infrastructure of these data centers towards cloud computing.
Standards in cloud computing are evolving, and according to a leading standards organization, some of the key features of cloud computing are:
Pooling of resources:The provider’s computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model. There is a sense of location independence in that the customer generally has no control over or knowledge of the exact location of the provided resources.
Quick elasticity: Capacity can be elastically provisioned and released, in some cases automatically, to quickly scale out and in according to demand. To the consumer, the capacities available for provisioning often seem limitless and can be appropriated in any quantity at any time.
metered service: Cloud systems automatically monitor and optimize resource usage by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (for example, storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled and reported, providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the service used.
Since this leads to a situation where cloud computing must provide services where there is no downtime and resources are shared, so naturally the hardware for cloud computing is evolving, the technology related to grid computing, clustering – RAC, servers and better performing servers. Providers are increasingly offering virtualization to meet the characteristics of cloud computing.
A brief look at the terminology and technology used,
A cluster consists of a group of independent but interconnected computers whose combined resources can be applied to a processing task. A ‘clusterware’ is a term used to describe the software that provides interfaces and services that enable and support a cluster. The combination of clusterware and automatic storage management provides a unified cluster solution that is the foundation of the real application cluster database.
True application clusters allow multiple nodes in a clustered system to mount and open a single database that resides on shared disk storage. If a single system (node) fails, the database service will continue to be available on the remaining nodes.
Cloud computing may still take a few more years to mature and could well redefine the IT outsourcing map.
The author is a PMP Certified Professional and writes his own blog at http://indian-amps.blogspot.com