Cloud Computing: being aware and beware

Sun May 03 00:00:00 IST 2009, by Abhishek Mehta

Cloud computing is talk of the town. From an Internet user to a developer, venture capitalist or technology vanguard, no one can ignore it. Cloud computing phenomena existed in separate disjointed shapes in the IT industry from decades, but market strategists and leaders today have connected all the shapes of Jigsaw and have wrapped it in a attractive packaging. Bad market comes as blessing in disguise and has become a catalyst. Businesses are trying to stay afloat in recession; even a straw floating in water can be their hope and cloud computing appears to be a promising log. Wikipedia defines cloud computing as:

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them. **

Imagine a trendsetting application (Business Model) on buzzing WEB 2.0 technologies; wrapped under SaaS model using Cloud computing to scale. Cloud helps in "rapid provisioning" and "automatic scaling" as customers/tenants will grow. Pay only for the computing resources, which have been utilized, and no extra expenditure towards networking, server farm, administration and load-balancing employees or hardware is required. This is a perfect scenario for any business. Say it be SalesForce, Google or Microsoft- your business is up against anyone and anything respecting your billfold. It is just like walking on red carpet, coming out of limousine, which is rented not purchased.

Web applications and services offered via cloud computing are termed as Cloud services. Some services provide storage capacities, processing power, on demand computing, web applications and framework for your applications on the Cloud. In nutshell these are the in trend abstractions of cloud services:

• No need to install applications (e.g. Word processors) on your local machine, log into the cloud using internet, browser open your documents (Google docs), work on them, save and store on the cloud itself.
• No need to take backup of your data/photos on external drives, hook into a cloud and store everything there (e.g. Picasa, Windows Live)
• Collaboration made easy; as everything is on the web and only you know the guys with whom you want to collaborate with.
• Expecting High traffic this Diwali on your website; request for more space and processing speed for your application from Mr. Cloud and get going. ("Automatic scaling")
• Got newer version of your software. If it runs on the Cloud, then just upgrade it on the cloud and no up gradation required on every customer end. ("Rapid provisioning")

Cloud computing is an upcoming trend and will catch up even more but it is important to differentiate between the buzz, fuzz and fizz. It is the next big thing but this does not make Cloud computing best thing for everyone. You might be a prospective user, developer or funder of the Cloud but your perspective should be based on being aware and beware of these tips/points.

Dealing with Cloud Computing: Being aware

1) Cloud has a quantitative financial advantage for everyone involved. Once you start depending upon the Cloud for your needs (storage/processing/application) lots of money can be saved. Every single computer of yours does not have to be a high end machine with lots of memory, higher processing speeds and RAM, as no application will be installed on your machine, no need to save big files on your PC. Even best of the PC slows down once tens of standalone applications and anti viruses are installed on them. You cut all that cost and can still run highest end application using a browser and Internet connection. Cloud provides the processing and storage thrust for your needs.

2) Imagine on demand cloud like EC2 from Amazon, which can provide you highest end virtual servers with merely a service request and charge you for the time spend and processing speed, which has been utilized. It is like hiring a cab for going from one place to another without owning it. Your travel is done in few dollars rather than spending thousands of dollars to buy a car for 10 miles of commute. And above that you saved on insurance and servicing of the vehicle.

In nutshell IT cost for running the businesses goes down drastically not only on infrastructure but also staffing. You do not Network administrators, security and server farms. Another big saving comes in the form of no maintenance and saving on Annual maintenance contracts of hardware. Every Business feels the pinch of steep depreciation in their IT infrastructure investment over period of months. So depreciation and one time dead investments will now be changed into raw material based fixed expenditure. This certainly will help the accounts department along with better projections for the business.

3) The best of Cloud computing for me comes in the form of increased processing power and inexhaustible storage, which can be available to every individual using it. Does not matter how bad you PC is, if it can run a browser and have a good internet connection then you are as good as guy sitting on supercomputer. This feature of Cloud computing will make the future of Netbooks and 100$ PC for developing countries even more viable. Critic of cheaper PC has always questioned the usability of such low end processing machines when power of super computers is getting into HOME PC. I guess Cloud computing has satisfied their curiosity and brave hearts are talking about 50$ computer for under developed countries.

4) Data backup eats up lots of money for professionally managed companies. Every single computer have to be backed up and every server should run replicated copy of itself to avoid data loss during crashing of one instance and so on. That is all off your head with Cloud computing that is some one else problem. You can lockup you office a 6 PM and let the tiny piece of software keep on doing the synchronization of your data on 3rd parties storage cloud. Access your documents anytime, anywhere, always from anything (PC, laptop, mobile, PDA).

5) If no software needs to be installed on your machines for running an application then you obviously save money on buying it. You either use free services for getting your tasks done or paid ones where you pay only per the usage. No one has to worry about downloading and installing the latest release of the software as it is not installed on the your system anyways. Your service provider will upgrade the application on the cloud and you will have latest features when you login. This saves time, hassle and maintenance cost for each business.

6) Forget about how to open MS word on Linux operating system and how to open word 2007 document with Word 2003 software. Compatibility problems have got outsourced to the Cloud. Do not worry, if you have Macintosh, Linux book or windows all what mattes is the browser and Internet speed. Its not the operating system compatibility issue with your files anymore its all about browsers.

I hope people will fully understand why there was such a dire need for Google to come out with their own browser "Chrome". The new Internet war and the fight of Internet supremacy will not be fought for Office suites or Windows/Mac but in the web browser front.

7) Collaboration made easy, location does not matter neither does time zone nor the presence of everyone who is important. Join together in a group, use cloud-serviced application and collaborate on documents, presentations, scheduling. Cloud computing model is driving collaboration forces in a big way. Cloud computing is to collaboration what web 2.0 is to social networking.

Dealing with Cloud Computing: Being Beware

1) Internet is oxygen of Cloud computing, it that goes away you will be fish out of water. Before you take a shot on moving most of your daily needs to the cloud make sure that your Internet connection is as strong as Himalayas. Areas and countries where Internet speed and connection reliability is doubtful there Cloud computing can not replace the traditional PC dependency. There are some cloud services like Google gears which can help you to work on your documents offline, but that is not really the idea of perfect Cloud for me.

2) If you are business guy who travel a lot Cloud is a thing for you, but if you travel to the areas, which are not fully Wifi, or have slow bandwidths then you are in a fix. I can understand people having expensive navigational systems and net connectivity even in the deep oceans but that does not make it viable for every individual to use. Slow Internet speeds will kill the Internet itself so no question of building cloud on top of it. If it takes you a while just to navigate through your email then the time taken to flip through your document pages will be simply unacceptable.

3) One fact which I must agree to is that cloud based applications are not as feature rich as their desktop counterparts and simple reason is that even best of internet lines can be sometimes slow. Say one worldwide Internet gateways go down Africa will have ripple effect on the Cloud around the globe. So having an application as rich as MS Office on the Cloud does not look like a viable option any time sooner. Time lag between one Internet request and another cannot be determined with timely precise manner. Internet speed has nothing to do with how quickly your Cloud will respond to your request. {Do not worry this is not as bad as a minute, but this is not also as good as micro seconds}

4) Security is one thing, which is not same for all the applications. Some applications have to be more secure then others and data is more confidential then others. So can Cloud service provider be trusted? I will say yes, but can they be hacked? even then the answer is yes. In the case of Cloud, service provider also controls/holds your data. You are only that much secured as much your cloud service provider is.

5) If the Cloud service provider goes down or crashes then you are also bound to go down. By the basic nature of Cloud Computing there are provisioning of automatic scaling, load balancing and data duplication but that can some time turn out to be only theoretical thing, as this has already happened once with EC2 in 2008.

6) If you are planning to provide a service in Cloud to the customers then you have be Cloud compatible. Some Cloud use Java, other are python based. Though all services are delivered via Web Services and say it is SaaS, PaaS and on demand computing but development has to be framework compatible. And one Cloud differ form other significantly when it comes to application development and deployment.

Some famous cloud computing platforms:

EC2 and S3 from Amazon - Google App Engine - Force.com from Salesforce - IBM blue cloud - Skytap - StrikeIron - Nirvanix - Mosso

If cost cutting is the only motivation for moving to the Cloud then I will ask you to rate your past cost cutting measures:
1) Do you use Open Office rather then commercial Word processing software?
2) How much benefit your organization had taken out of open source Linux (GUI rich) operating system?
3) What is usage level of open source technologies in your current development projects/products?
Keeping your current motivation and business interests in mind, If you have not done well on the mentioned points (some exceptions) then I am afraid that the money saving in moving to the Cloud can be only that much successful.

Posted at 12:00AM May 03, 2009 by ABhi in Trends  |  Comments[2]