by Paulo Laranetto
Cloud computing has different meanings for different people. When I first talked to Anand Tirumani about the cloud, I sensed right away his deep passion and knowledge about cloud computing. An information technology aficionado and natural entrepreneur, Anand was with IBM for close to 20 years, working in different roles and capacities. He became heavily involved with cloud computing during his latter career years at IBM, and has recently attended a certification training on Amazon Cloud Computing web services. Cloud computing was the topic covered by Anand’s presentation in the June 2014 DACS general meeting.
Mr. Tirumani started the meeting by showing the audience the first distributed computer system he developed at IBM close to 20 years ago, emphasizing the total time and cost required to put such a system in place. He concluded the meeting with some interesting thoughts about the effort and resources that would be required to develop the same system using cloud technology.
So what is cloud computing? In simple terms, cloud computing is using the Internet to access someone else’s software, running on someone else’s hardware, in someone else’s data center. That is, cloud computing is a new network computing model that delivers IT infrastructure, applications, and services to organizations and end users on-demand and remotely via the Internet. One way to think of cloud computing is to compare its usage to that of electricity. You pay as you go, on demand, and without having to maintain any hardware in your house.
Some of the key attributes of cloud computing are: on-demand and self-service delivery of computing resources, broad network access with high speed information processing, resource pooling and sharing, elasticity of computing resources, and measured service utilization for charge back.
There are three main models of cloud computing services:
(1) Software as a Service (SaaS): End-user applications delivered as a service rather than as traditional, on-premises software. The most commonly referenced examples of SaaS are Salesforce.com, which provides a customer relationship management (CRM) system accessible via the Internet, and GoToMeeting for online meetings and collaboration. Other examples of SaaS that have been used for years are the Internet based email services such as Google Mail, Microsoft Outlook, and Yahoo mail.
(2) Platform as a Service (PaaS): PaaS provides an application platform, or middleware, as a service on which developers can build and deploy custom applications. Microsoft’s Windows Azure and Google’s App Engine are examples of PaaS solutions.
(3) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): IaaS includes the hardware and technology for computing power, storage, operating systems, or other infrastructure, delivered as off-premises, on-demand services rather than as dedicated, on-site resources. Examples of IaaS are Amazon Elastic Cloud (Amazon EC2) and IBM SoftLayer.
Cloud computing infrastructure deployments are categorized as: (a) Public Cloud, (b) Private Cloud, and (c) Hybrid Cloud.
(a) Public Cloud infrastructure is hosted by a cloud vendor at the vendor’s premises and can be shared by various organizations. Examples of public clouds are Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
(b) Private Cloud infrastructure is dedicated to a particular organization and not shared with other organizations. They are more expensive and more secure when compared to public cloud. Examples of private cloud deployments are HP Cloud System Enterprise, IBM Smart Cloud, and Cisco Cloud Services.
(c) Hybrid Cloud allows organizations to host critical applications on private clouds and applications requiring relatively less security on public cloud. As the name implies , hybrid cloud makes usage of both public and private clouds together.
Cloud computing is growing fast. Public cloud computing grew from $17.4 billion worth of IT spending in 2009 to $44 billion in 2013. The US Government is dedicated to spending 27% of its 2014 IT budget on cloud computing. So why is Cloud Computing becoming so popular now? One of the main reasons is the proliferation of hardware virtualization and multi-tenant applications over the Internet. This new computing paradigm has become an accepted method of connecting service providers with consumers. Internet providers are offering robust network services to organizations enabling greater consolidation efficiencies. Plus, the cost versus risk equation has turned towards shared solutions where computing capabilities are seen as an on-going commodity service rather than an internal capital expenditure. The reality is that enterprises that fail to adopt cloud computing will fall behind competition and will have a hard time retaining customers and business partners. Just think of Amazon, a company born in the Internet and in the cloud. I believe that is every corporation’s dream to be as cloud oriented as Amazon.
When compared to traditional distributed computing, the cloud has several advantages: deployment time is reduced from weeks and months to minutes, scalability becomes instantaneous and more flexible, no complicated contracts or upfront costs, pay as you go, reduced E-waste, and reduced software licensing costs. So are there any disadvantages to the cloud? Some will say that cloud computing is less secure than distributed computing and to some extent, that is true, although private cloud can address many of the security concerns. The main disadvantage of cloud computing is that it relies 100% on the Internet. A dead Internet connection means no work, and in areas where Internet connections are few or inherently unreliable, this could be a big problem.
Anand completed his presentation with a demo of the AWS Overview, AWS Services, and Amazon Simple Storage Service S3 and provided a comparison to some of the other cloud storage services such as Google Drive, DropBox, iCloud, and Microsoft Sky Drive.
Mr. Tirumani concluded the presentation by reflecting back on his first IBM developed system and how things would have been done differently in a true cloud computing environment.
In short, the cloud is here now and will be here for a long time. Cloud computing is outpacing the IT industry and its business value can be realized by customers of all sizes. Cloud solutions are simple to acquire, don’t require long term contracts, and are easy to scale up and down as needed. The beauty of cloud computing is that users of IT-related services can focus on what the services provide them, rather than how the services are implemented or hosted.