Cloud Buzz - Vol 1 - Edition 1

Cloud Buzz is a quick roundup of interesting happenings in the Cloud space

1.       Microsoft Azure extends beyond PaaS to IaaS through its VMRole offering. This puts its offering on par  with IaaS offerings from Amazon like AWS EC2 – James Staten blogs about it here

2.       SalesForce.com now offers Database as a Service. Database.com provides access to data for an application written in any language, on any platform and to any end-point device – Network Computing talks of it.

3.       Vivek Kundra, CIO of US Federal Government has unveiled 25 point plan to improve efficiency of the US government IT infrastructure. The plan hinges chiefly around the “Cloud First” policy unveiled earlier that insists that the public cloud to realize these efficiencies – Kevin Jackson blogs about it in his Cloud Musings Blog

4.    Estimates by Gartner show that the software as a service (SaaS) market is expected to grow to 18% by 2013 – Cloud Computing Zone

IT Needs Then and Cloud Needs Now....

When the digital computer age was ushered in way back in the 1960s, IBM ruled the roost with System/360, a large mainframe offering. Over a decade and half we saw the emergence of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) with PDP and VAX systems, Hewlett Packard with HP-2115, Data General with its Novas. Each company had its own proprietary hardware stack and languages they supported. While DEC supported UNIX which was in its infancy then, HP supported Fortran and Algol and IBM had its own proprietary mainframe language. 

Enterprise and consumer needs drove adoption of these different stack each of which were best suited for a particular segment. Over the next 2-3 decades, enterprises suddenly realized that the computer industry had left them with a spaghetti of systems none of which were inter operable or supported cross talk. And this after millions of dollars had been poured to procure these systems. The anguish was so pronounced that it drove some of the legacy providers to extinction while others had to learn to dance to survive. Louis Gerstner, the erstwhile CEO of IBM, in his book, "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?"  gives an account of IBM's historic turnaround between April 1993 and March 2002. Lou Gerstner led IBM from the brink of bankruptcy and mainframe obscurity back into the forefront of the technology business. He did so by reorienting the company's business to the demands of the time. One of the main cornerstones he lay was the establishment of IBM Global Services - a System Integration division whose main objective was to help enterprises stitch together the multitude of computer systems they had invested in and get them to co-work. Thus was born the huge SI industry that has seen the likes of IBM, Accenture, EDS, CapGemini and the Indian majors like TCS, Wipro, Infosys, HCL, Cognizant drive business.

The reason I cited a snippet from history is to demonstrate two things

1. To draw a comparison between the digital computing era and the cloud computing world as it is evolving
2. To give the reader an indication of how transformations in the industry happen over years and decades.

Cloud computing industry was a buzz word for most part of the first decade in the new millennium. The fag end of the decade saw the emergence of Amazon Web Services, Google Apps, Microsoft Azure, Go Grid, SalesForce's Force.com as some prime cloud players. We also see a lot of smaller players who serve niche needs like Service Mesh, Zuora, JamCracker, Ping Identity, etc who complement the bigger players. However, the biggest lacuna is the interoperability of clouds. Users choosing a cloud provider do not have a seamless path to migrate to another cloud.provider. What you see is a picture similar to the erstwhile era. A rising need felt by enterprise customers to ensure a fair degree of standards and interoperability between clouds. What that also means is the need for companies that would help enterprises achieve it. Whether this set of players would come from the the big league or from the small niche of players remains to be seen...What's your take on this matter?

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Understanding Cloud Computing - 2

Remember the analogy I presented to you in my last post in the series? About the cloud being akin to a giant computer. We also talked about the 3 layers of this computer. What was interesting was the fact that each of them had the "as a Service" suffix. What does this mean and what are its implications. 

Extending out giant computer analogy a little further, it is certain that such a giant computer is not for any individual or institution's use alone. Rather it is a computer that can be used by everybody who has a need for the same. Theoretically, the computer is so huge that every body could make use of it at different points of time or at the same time. While somebody might be needing just a few GB of hard disk space on this computer and some processing power, another team might be thinking of requesting several TB of space and lots of RAM and some specific applications. As each and every individual/team requests these units from the computer, these are allocated almost in real time to these individuals. Once they are done using the computer for their use, they relinquish the requested resource units that get added to the main pool for somebody else to take advantage of them. Hence the giant computer's resources are available on demand as a service. Just like how a taxi is available as a service for you when you need to get from one point to another or your when your own car has broken down. 

All three layers of the cloud, the infrastructure layer, the platform layer and the software layer are available as a service for its consumers. Hence  the suffix "as a service".

In our next post in this series, lets look at the Infrastructure layer in detail and understand its intricacies

Understanding Cloud Computing - 1

A lot of my readers ask me fundamental questions on cloud. This series of posts are dedicated to all my fans and readers who would like cloud computing to be simplified for them.

Let's start with a pictorial analogy of cloud computing to something that we are more familiar with. Consider a server or even your desktop computer or a laptop. A scratch at the surface to see what makes these computing devices tick reveals 3 distinct layers.

1. The hardware consisting of the motherboard, the memory (RAM, hard disks), the processor, etc
2. The operating system that loads when you first switch on your computer - Windows, Linux, Unix, etc
3. The software applications that you use when using your computer - Notepad, Word, Paint Brush, Winamp, Internet Explorer, etc

A cloud in simple terms is your computer multiplied sever hundred thousand times and can go beyond theoretically to infinity. More on this characteristic in my next post.

Coming back to the analogy, imagine the cloud to be one giant computer. Obviously you would need the equivalent of the 3 layers here too, right?

1. Infrastructure - IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) - The hardware layer equivalent
2. Platform - PaaS (Platform as a Service) - The Operating system equivalent with more bells and whistles. Lets understand that in a separate post
3. Software - SaaS (Software as a Service) -The software applications you would use to draw on the power of the giant cloud computer.

You might have noticed that all three had the terms "as a Service" attached to them. Let's explore that in our next post in this series.

Privacy on the Clouds - Debatable still?

IT enterprise customers have been cringing on the privacy aspects of public clouds. However, pundits and cloud vendors have been shouting atop their voices on how the privacy aspects have been dealt with.

Privacy on the public cloud will face a litmus test with the current Wikileaks shock wave. Wikileaks reported hacking of its website ever since it has started flooding the media with disclosures. It claimed that a mass distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is preventing users from accessing the site.

Following that was the news item that Wikileaks was moving to Amazon Web Services EC2 cloud to host its website and data disclosures.The Inquirer reports that ever since Wikileaks reappeared on Amazon's EC2 cloud service, with visitors being re-directed to servers in Europe and the US.

Wiki Leaks moved from its private hosting to a public cloud. Given the circumstances, it could not afford to be on a DDOS attack for ever on its private cloud. At the same time, this move by Wikileaks is sure to raise eye-brows in the US government, A company publishing material that the US condemns and has publicly asked it to refrain from publishing is now hosted on the servers located in its own geography and under a well-known US Enterprise. It sure might be in the realms of US federal scrutiny under security acts but then what happens to all of Amazon's claims of data privacy on its clouds.

Grids and Clouds - The fundamental differences

Quite often I get the query on what is the difference between a grid and a cloud. Well, lets try and net the differences.

The grid is a 'pre-cloud' terminology. However it distinctly stands for setups by academic groups who wanted to resolve problems that required crunching of large number sets. Typical usages involve satellite image crunching, weather pattern analysis, analyzing data from nuclear experiments or other extreme physics, number crunching to resolve mathematical conjectures, etc.

The objective of setting up these grids was primarily to assemble several high performing servers and get them to work in parallel. Hence you also get to see the term High Performance Computing (HPC) being used in the context of grids. Some of the best know grids are also recognized as the world's best supercomputers.

This is where today's public clouds stand to differ. They are setup to achieve scalability as against performance that grids were setup for. Assemble enough of commoditized infrastructure to help enterprises offload work and data onto these systems. Providing platforms for High Scale Computing (HSC) and not high Performance Computing has been the driver for clouds of today. 

Clouds are designed to take on problems that are in cloud parlance described as "Embarrassingly Parallel Problem"(EPP) Consider a problem that involves finding out the number of times the word "Apple" has been repeated in all of Encyclopedia Britannica's content. A problem whose solution can be approached a typical EPP fashion. Divide and distribute the problem into as many words as there are in the encyclopedia and then funnel them all into a routine that runs in parallel to check if the word matches with "Apple". Each parallel routine returns a 1 or 0. A final counter gets updated as each routine returns its results. A massively parallel approach to solve the problem in minutes that otherwise might have taken days if not months for a stand alone system to solve. All achieved by utilizing the HSC aspect of today's clouds.

A HPC system would rather have a highly complex routing running in each node and one that might also involve certain nodes to continue their crunching based on outputs of few other nodes and vice versa. HPC works on a different dimension.

An interesting article that probes the HPC-HSC subject further

Ray Ozzie's Vision of the Cloud

Ray Ozzie, the chief architect of Microsoft in a recent memo to his direct reportees and executive staff at Microsoft talked about the way cloud would eventually evolve
.
He says,

We’re moving toward a world of

1) cloud-based continuous services that connect us all and do our bidding, and

 Continuous services are applications that reside on the cloud, run continuously, take advantage of the cloud characteristics to achieve infinite scalability, abstract a lot tasks that can be relegated to the background wherever it helps us define a simpler world.

2) appliance-like connected devices enabling us to interact with those cloud-based services.

Anything that has a connection to enable us access the continuous cloud services. It could be things as pronounced as smart phone, TVs, etc to something as uncharacteristic of having connectivity as your wallet, your shirt, your shoe sole, etc that connect to services on the cloud to transmit real time date further lending to the services model. With IPV6 being rolled out and the Internet of Things concept  turning these into a reality, Ray Ozzie's connected devices does seem to be taking shape.

This is quite an interesting note from the viewpoint that it adds a certain perspective to the otherwise chaotic or rather nebulous environment we are seeing as cloud computing gains traction.