As the IT field evolves, it becomes more mature, the need to optimize costs naturally drives innovation and creativity. The new concept along with the technology, which is now making the rounds, is ‘cloud computing’.
I had come across people with limited IT knowledge who asked me what ‘cloud computing’ is. However, I had tried to explain to them in the best possible way, most of the time, I ended up with a blank look at them, which was indicative that they did not understand the concept or the background behind cloud computing.
What is cloud computing?
Recently, I started giving you an example of home with kitchen Vs restaurant to explain the concept behind ‘cloud computing’. A kitchen in the home is dedicated to the home, the resources, be it the containers or the appliances or the person who cooks is dedicated to that home. The owner of the house invests in cooking and takes advantage of the benefit of having the kitchen for himself or for the members of his family. It is the owner of the house who has to maintain the kitchen. When you compare home cooking with restaurant, the end goal is the same, which is the specific food that is offered, but the way the food is prepared or served is different. You don’t own anything in a restaurant except for the food that is offered. Simply put, the same concept is between traditional IT offering and cloud computing.
Like home cooking, in the case of traditional IT offering, the company owns the hardware and software licenses, and sometimes the company outsources application development to a third party that is comparable to the hired chef ( if a person is rich) to prepare food at home. . With the evolution of the IT industry in hardware and software, we are moving towards the “restaurant” model of IT services; You only pay for what your end goal is: ‘processed foods’ or ‘services’. As in a restaurant, where you are only concerned with the quality of the food and the expected service offer and you don’t care much about who the chef, the waiter or the kitchen appliances is or even where the kitchen is, that’s right. the case of ‘cloud computing’. ‘, the customer focuses on the service offering and not on the hardware, software, raw information or resources used to provide the service offering or the final product.
Organizations are not going to jump into cloud computing, but will evolve and move towards the characteristics of cloud computing infrastructure over a period of time, as they will feel confident about the same. When it comes to cloud computing, I think we are in a similar stage to the early 90’s when it comes to outsourcing IT services. IT services were outsourced, so that the organization could focus on the “core” business area, cloud computing could well be a step further.
Now, let’s take a look at the service models that are typically considered in cloud computing.
SAaS: Software – as – service:
This model has been talked about for quite some time, business applications are hosted on a server maintained by data centers. Legal issues, security, integration, and data confidentiality of the deterrents of this model at this time. Once policies, procedures, and standards are defined and refined over a period of time, they are likely to be adopted over time.
In terms of use, the application is accessed through the web browser and the terms and conditions may be governed by service level agreements.
Possible examples could be a simple free generic email service for a complex ERP system.
IaaS: Infrastructure – as – service:
The computing, storage, hardware servers are considered under this service model. It can also be found for free in the storage offered on the web, this could be called IaaS..
PaaS: Platform – as – service:
The development and deployment platform could be offered as a service to developers to create, deploy, and manage applications on SAaS.
If one looks at the cloud deployment strategy, they are typically public, private, and hybrid clouds. I feel like the name itself is significant enough to describe the guy.
The next question is, what kind of hardware is needed to host cloud computing?
At this time, cloud computing is typically implemented on the traditional model. By traditional model, I mean that one could have a server to serve the database level or the application level, which is almost a ‘silo’ based model. But from cloud computing, you need to have efficient hardware and manpower (see my restaurant example) to better manage the cloud in a data center. This is where hardware could play a major role, new technology such as network computing, real application clusters, automatic storage management, server scaling, and server virtualization functions play an important role for better cloud management and implementation.
As we move forward, we would move away from ‘Silos’ based computer systems and applications. The cloud computing infrastructure would reside in the data center, this would require efficient use of hardware and more manpower would be required to support multiple servers or applications. Optimization and effective control would play a bigger role in managing the infrastructure of these data centers towards cloud computing.
Standards in cloud computing are evolving and according to a leading standards organization, some of the key characteristics of cloud computing are,
Pooling resources:The provider’s computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model. There is a sense of location independence in the sense that the customer generally has no control or knowledge over the exact location of the resources provided.
Quick elasticity: Capacities can be elastically provisioned and released, in some cases automatically, to rapidly scale in and out according to demand. To the consumer, the capacities available for provisioning often seem limitless and can be appropriated in any quantity at any time.
Measured service: Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource usage by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (for example, storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). The use of resources can be monitored, controlled and reported, providing transparency for both the provider and the consumer of the service used.
As this leads to a situation where cloud computing needs to provide services where there is no downtime and resources are shared, naturally the hardware for cloud computing is evolving, the technology related to computing in network, clustering – RAC, servers and better performance servers Virtualization has increased the offer of providers to meet the characteristics of cloud computing.
A brief look at the terminology and technology used,
A cluster consists of a group of independent but interconnected computers whose combined resources can be applied to a processing task. A ‘clusterware’ is a term used to describe software that provides interfaces and services that enable and support a cluster. The combination of clusterware and automatic storage management provides a unified cluster solution that is the foundation of a real application cluster database.
Real application clusters allow multiple nodes in a clustered system to mount and open a single database that resides on shared disk storage. If a single system (node) fails, the database service will continue to be available on the remaining nodes.
It may take a few more years before cloud computing matures and could well redefine the IT outsourcing map.
The author is a PMP certified professional and writes his own blog at http://indian-amps.blogspot.com
