Cloud Computing – A Paradigm Shift (go back »)
March 4 2011, 4:57 AM
While enterprises are compelled to reduce cost and their IT spending day by day, to meet this growing business needs, IT industry is going through a paradigm shift in different technological areas and breakthrough innovations.
“Cloud Computing” is another such evolution IT industry is banking upon that gives a whole new dimension to Web Computing.
Everyone these days seems to be talking about "Cloud Computing", but there is no clear cut definition available in the market. This paper meant to throw some light on the meaning of Cloud Computing to business and IT community.
The Web technology has evolved over the period of time from merely publishing the static information to the dynamic information sharing what we see today. This flexibility from Internet is now transforming into the new era of “Cloud Computing” where business can take advantage of what is already on internet in day to day life and need not have to really own that piece of the service.
Cloud computing is a evolving concept and a style of computing where tasks are assigned to immensely scalable IT services that are hosted on Internet and that exposes various IT capabilities to end customers uniformly such as application services, business services, storage, network etc.
CC can take advantage of IT resources over the cloud as well (out side enterprise), when need arises for e.g. may be a cart service can talk with payment service on the cloud. This type of computing even can use other resources such as SANs, network equipments. Operating at cloud level gives users a flexibility to scale vertically and thus provides easy access to the services using a very thin client such as Blackberry or iPhone. For this same reason alternatively it is also termed as “on-demand computing”. So on and all this new way of computing have a great potential and future for sure.
Wikipedia defines it correctly as
Cloud computing is Internet (“Cloud”) based development and use of computer technology (“Computing”). It is a style of computing where IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service” allowing users to access technology-enabled services from the Internet ("in the cloud") without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them.
It is important to note that any service or application over the internet is not a cloud. But it has to meet all the characteristics of “Cloud Computing” and few on the important ones can be described as below:
- A service or application over available over the internet (“Cloud”) and no special installation required.
- A service or application is immensely scalable on-demand.
- Services must be highly available.
- Provides Pay-as-you-go model for on-demand computing to the customers.
- The service must be a guaranteed delivery over the internet and not just merely using the internet.
Cloud computing is often confused as grid computing, but in reality it compliments it. Taking advantage of Grid Computing in cloud computing can give it natural power of super computer.
Essentially there are two types cloud can exist into as obvious; Public Cloud and Private Cloud.
As definition suggests, Public cloud is open for public to access, designed for immense salability. Private cloud is been built for an enterprise, providing more security.
The notable difference between them is the upfront investment an enterprise has to do. Public cloud generally based on pay-as-go-model giving enterprise a huge cost advantage upfront. Even though this is true, over the time private cloud can be a cost winner. Public cloud, since in public domain, will not provide access to you for your data whereas Private cloud control is with you, thus providing control on your own data. With increasing capabilities of public cloud day over day, vendors are working hard to provide such control to the customers even in Public Cloud.
The choice of a particular type is completely lies with enterprises, though public cloud is more suited for startups and SMB segment.
We can think of Cloud Computing consisting two components viz. Cloud Platform and Cloud Applications.
As the name suggests, this platform allows developers to host the applications and services in cloud or take use of services from cloud.
Think of the current scenario where basic infrastructure such as operating systems, hosting engines, network infrastructure, and storage space is required within the enterprise to host the applications in staging & production. Taking use of Cloud Computing Platform now eliminate all these needs. Unfortunately not many cloud platforms are available today and vendors are rising to this challenge. Microsoft’s Azure platform is one of such cloud platform that has capabilities such as store, compute & interact. The Windows Azure platform is based on Microsoft.NET framework version 3.5 and IIS v 7.0. It provides set of APIs for developers to create their cloud applications & services.
These are the applications in cloud hosted on cloud platforms such as Windows Azure.
A typical IT landscape for on-premises applications looks like this:
The on-premises solution landscape for any enterprise consists of:
- Infrastructure – Consists of Platform, Operating System, Network resources, Development Tools etc.
- Core Business applications & Services – Business application services that are hosted on the Infrastructure
- Peripheral Applications & Services – Such as monitoring tools, common services etc.
- Storage / Integration / Workflow Services – Such as databases, Integration servers, workflow services
- Entitlement – Authentication & Authorization
Cloud computing provides exact similarities in addition to providing its own benefits.
As the cloud awareness is increasing day by day among enterprises, the field is open for an competition already.
One of the most discussed and powerful Cloud Platform today is Microsoft’s Windows Azure. Azure is a full-fletched non-commercial operating system from Microsoft that has capabilities of Storage, Compute, & Manage. The Platform comprises of many cloud services components such as .NET services, SQL Services & Live Services.
One of the widely used available Cloud Operating System today is Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). EC2 provides way to specify how many Linux instances running on Virtual Machines customer requires. This is achieved through a commercial web service. It uses a technology viz. “Xen Virtualization”.
GoGrid is another vendor that provides cloud platform. Cloud platform services also provide windows support.
Microsoft also provides a CRM cloud platform through their Dynamic CRM Live Offering.
Cloud applications are the application services in cloud. Cloud application services are generally confused with SaaS but in reality they are not SaaS.
So what is the difference between SaaS and Cloud Applications?
SaaS is a first step towards Cloud Applications.
1. SaaS typically resides in private cloud out of the enterprises and is more customized for a customer or set of customers; whereas Cloud applications are typically make use of public cloud and uniform in nature for different customers. Best example of cloud applications can be given as Salesforce.com.
2. Cloud Applications can scale multiple times than SaaS applications since they are designed to run on one to many machines that gives them immense power to scale and you can add as many virtual servers as you need.
There are immense benefits of this approach. It gives direct benefits to business including profitability improvements.
1. There is no on-premises IT infrastructure or installation required and hence a huge IT cost reduction.
2. It gives enterprises a flexibility to use it need basis and no overheads for IT maintenance and hence operational efficiency is achieved.
3. Since there is no infrastructure or IT tools required to be maintained by the enterprises, the obvious labor cost attached to it is saved.
4. It can offer virtually unlimited computing power which can be utilized for large operations for e.g. search an email from within GBs of data.
5. Users still have control on their Cloud Infrastructure, Application and Data.
On in all, having gone through all these discussions here are the takeaways from this paper:
- Cloud Computing is a style of technology for future and it will change the way we develop our IT
- Cloud Computing is surely a next generation approach towards an efficient IT solution and enterprises should start looking at it to take early benefits of it
- Cloud is based on SOA model, thus provides more flexibility, agility to the business
- Provides on-demand computing model giving huge cost advantage to enterprises
- Immensely scalable providing high computing power and high availability
In Architecture
Comments
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 comments
Page 1 of 1
Add Comment
You must be logged in to comment
Profile
- Male
- 35 years old
Statistics
| Comments | 1 |
| Page views | 455 |