Technology put to relevant use, often has the effect of making one feel “Why didn’t someone think of this before?” With internet around, this feeling is only being felt too often.
Why is this opening statement relevant to cloud computing? You ask….
Let me give you an example. There have been a number of times when I have saved a word document on my home computer, forgotten to email it to myself or take it in a pen drive and then have had to rethink of an alternative to get the information I need… When Google docs came by, I was awed by this simple (I don’t mean a least bit in implementation) and seemingly obvious solution.
BTW if you use Google docs and other related applications, you’re already hooked onto the cloud, you’re probably just not aware…. i.e., till now… :)
Google docs is a fine example of cloud computing. It allows for a user to use an application stored on a remote server without having to install it on his/her PC and one can access from any medium that’s connected to the internet.
Some of the terms you often get to hear along with cloud computing are:
SaaS (Software as a service): Typical example is Google docs...
HaaS (Hardware as a service): An example that has been mentioned a number of times (I wasn’t aware of it until I started researching on Cloud computing) is Amazon’s Elastic compute cloud or EC2. It allows a user to work on a virtual machine with a scalable computing power. As a user you get to choose what combination of memory, CPU usage etc you need for your choice of OS on the virtual machine. For more information see: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing
Stay tuned to this space for more information on Cloud Computing and its relation to our focus: System Integration.
References:
http://abdullin.com/wiki/cloud-computing.html
Wow! Amazon.com never ceases to amaze me. I came across a web site in studying for this class that talks about Amazon's history. Apparently, they started with a single server for both customer information and inventory. And eventually, of course, they had to expand to 2 servers, etc., etc.
ReplyDeleteThe company seems to be taking what "it" has learned from its own growth experiences and is now using that to market as another service. Truly genius!
Here's the article in case anyone is interested:
http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid26_gci1195702,00.html
Personally, I don't think saving a file on some server charaterizes cloud computing, although it is usually taken as an example for cloud computing. What are the key and differentiating features of the cloud computing? We can discuss on this.
ReplyDelete@ Prof Zheng
ReplyDeleteI agree with you on the fact that cloud computing has far greater computing power than simple availability of platform-independent tools and scalable data storage. Amazon's EC2 is a pretty good example of that.Taking your suggestion, we will be posting more on Cloud Computing foraying into its charecterstics and future potential.
Cloud Computing is a great concept on paper but failures in this platform cost businesses real money. I read an article a year or so ago about the failure of EC2 on the morning of July 20, 2008. Amazon had hyped the stability of Cloud Computing to the point where they had businesses moving all of their applications onto EC2. One company in particular (the name escapes me now) hosted a specialized webmail service that distinguished itself from services like Hotmail, Yahoo, or Gmail on the EC2 platform. On the morning that EC2 crashed, for whatever reason, they not only were down but lost quite a bit of emails as a result. Needless to say that business went under literally overnight.
ReplyDeleteIf I am a CIO and my neck and salary are on the line, there is no way I am going to put 100% trust in another business to keep my business up and running 24/7 with a "relatively new" technology like Cloud Computing.
Also, CC is not a solution for small to mid-size businesses who, for cost purposes, are not going to have multiple backups for WAN access.
I'll buy into it once it has performed non-stop for three to five years without downtimes including maintenance.
Business don't necessarily stop on Sundays once a month or yearly on December 31 for 24 hours.
Sorry for the long comment.
DB
If I as a user am not aware that I am using a service that is on the cloud, why should I care?
ReplyDelete@David - You have a valid point. However, I would argue, if you put a mission critical app on a cloud that you don't control, well it was your fault.
The brilliance of cloud computing to me isn't used to just host your app. The brilliance is that you can have a standard set of servers you own that you leave running at 90% (or some high number) utilization, allowing you to make incredible cost efficiency with your owned hardware, and then when demand spikes/performance starts to suffer, you can load balance/distribute extra load to the cloud. If you determine that the increase in load wasn't a spike, but rather an actual increase in overall demand, buy your own capacities to meet it again, so that you can remove your costly cloud instances.
Cloud computing may be a very loose term, or a big umbrella term that covers lots of things. I think at least these two are the key characteristics of cloud computing:
ReplyDelete1. Remote resources (infrastructure, data, hardware, software, service, etc.)
2. Dynamic (on-demand) utilization.
Anything else?