Cloud Computing

Is this the next big thing?? Or is it already a thing of the past?? Cloud computing refers to delivering computing and storage capacity as a service. That is, no upfront cost and pay per use for the services you really require. With cloud computing we generally speak of three categories:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Software as a Service (SaaS)

Figure 1: Major players in Cloud Computing

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Infrastructure as a Service is when users rent use of servers based on the computational power needed and storage required. Most of the time users buy virtual machines in pay per use, but other devices are available such as physical servers, GPU clusters, firewalls, load balancers and networks. Examples include the massive Amazon EC2 and the Rackspace Cloud.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Cloud providers offer a computing platform including an operating system, database, web server and programming language execution environment. This means that the platform will be ready to deploy very quickly. Such platforms are specific for programming languages and databases used. For example Heroku is one of these with a platform specific for Ruby, Java, Python and Node.js. Such platforms typically scale according to load and use.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

This means that an application is readily supplied with all the configuration and the all the user needs to do is to configure the last few settings and tweaks. Examples of these are Google Apps and Office 365 which is a cloud based exchange server.

Figure 2: IBM Data Center

Private Cloud, Public Cloud or both?

Public Cloud are cloud services offered by a cloud service provider with pay per use models. Community cloud shares infrastructure between more than one organization with common concerns such as security and compliance. Private cloud is a cloud infrastructure operated solely for a single organization and can be either internally managed or externally managed and may also either be hosted internally or externally. Private cloud still has the upfront cost and the maintenance which means losing most of the advantages of cloud computing in the first place. Hybrid computing is a mix of one of the previously mentioned types of cloud. An organization might host most of the services in public cloud and may have some more sensitive applications and storage running in a private cloud environment.

Concerns

Of course people have a lot of concerns with cloud computing. There is a lack of control over what happens with the critical stuff of the company or the individual. The fact that the data is not stored within the facilities of the company or the individual is a huge concern. Privacy and security are also concerns. Compliance with standard is also something that you cannot do much about. Hidden costs are also an issue. Most providers request automatic payment at the end of the month, which can cause surprises. Outages in the data centers, although rare, can cause disruption to your services. Also, there will be a reliance on an internet connection to access the services. No internet and all your employees can go home as they can do nothing.

Figure 3: Location of Google Data Centers around the world

Major Benefits

Cloud Computing brings with it many benefits to the end user. These include access to a huge range of applications without having to download or install anything, applications can be accessed from any computer, anywhere in the world, users can avoid expenditure on hardware and software; only using what they need, companies can share resources in one place, consumption is billed as a utility with minimal upfront costs and scalability via on-demand resources.

There are several differences from traditional hosting to cloud hosting. The main differences are that cloud computing is sold on demand, the service is managed by the provider, users can determine the amount of service they take and users can log on to the network from any computer in the world

Infrastructure Required

Without doubt, large datacenters are required for all this to be offered. The video below shows a new data center being built by Soft Layer, a cloud computing provider. This shows the massive planning, space and hardware required for such a data center. Of course, this is only a small part as a large number of human resources and so on are required.

Figure 4: Video showing Soft Layer New Data Center

Cloud Training

Like always, with new technologies arise the need to become trained and certified. While cloud services are mostly identical to normal hosted or co-located servers, special certifications still exist and are very important. Some of the certifications available are mentioned in the video below.

Figure 5: Video showing Top 5 cloud certifications

Personal Experience

I have worked with Amazon AWS and Rackspace Cloud Servers. Both products are very good. Their internet speed is very fast and it is very easy to use the service and integrate with their APIs. Setting up is also very easy and it is much easier to create a new cloud server than purchasing a server, racking it up and starting from scratch every time you need to change something for testing. At the moment I would not know what to do without cloud computing!!