Question : “What’s cloud computing?”

Answer : “Cloud computing is me with my laptop computer on a plane, 30,000 feet up in the air.”

Yeah, right. Computing in the clouds maybe, but definitely not the industry’s notion of cloud computing. Actually, this conversation was overheard at one of those IT conferences. Now it remains unclear whether the response was meant to be a joke but it does underscore one of the banes of the IT industry – jargons, jargons everywhere and “cloud computing” is no exception.

So what is cloud computing?

IT research and advisory firm Gartner defines cloud computing as “a style of computing where massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ using Internet technologies to multiple external customers”. 

In essence, the 3 basic tenets of cloud computing are real time scalability, service oriented and provided over the Internet to external customers. That is to say that we the customer do not need to buy computer and software, all we need to do is to plug in “the cloud” to get our computing done; we only pay for what we use.

So what has that to do with clouds?

Actually, the cloud refers to the Internet. For the uninitiated, a cloud metaphor is used to represent the Internet in network diagrams. It is an abstraction that hides the underlying, complex network infrastructure. So plugging into the cloud means connecting to the Internet and getting your computing done regardless where you are and you do not need to know or bother where the server or data resides, as long as you can access it and it is secure as it is reliable.

Sounds simple, but that evolutionary step has been a long time in the making. There used to be a time where many companies used to build and own their data centers that serve their own computing needs, in fact many still do.

As the cost of servers plummet during the Internet era of the 1990s and 2000s, many businesses buy servers and host their servers at data centers operated by third parties. And since data centers are expensive to run and own, it made sense for businesses to pay for their fraction the space, electricity, networking as well as environmental services like the raised flooring, cooling, backup power and even fire prevention. Initially popular with startups with limited IT budgets, large companies like banks has gotten into the act in recent years in an attempt to contain IT costs. In most case businesses still owns the servers.

So is cloud computing same as server hosting?

Cloud computing goes beyond hosting – such that the business do not own any of the computing and nor the environmental assets. It is a service base model in the purest sense i.e. one flat charge for the resource you use; you will not see price per rack or price per megabit of network bandwidth, just 20 cents per gigabyte of storage service, period. It’s like taking a taxi to work instead of owning a car, you pay what’s on the meter. There is no car maintenance cost. And the taxi can be rented by someone else when you are not using it, which makes perfect business sense for the taxi operator.

But wait, that’s not all, cloud computing takes service to a whole new level – while it can provide you with a taxi when you need one, but it also do buses, coaches, trains and planes depending on your capacity needs and best of all it can respond to these needs “on demand”.

So what’s the magic?

Cloud computing is made viable in recent years with the combination of cheap and reliable high speed networking and server technologies like virtualization. Virtualization effectively unifies groups of servers in distributed computing environment while hiding its underlying complexity i.e. it takes many servers and make it work as one. More importantly, virtualization allows for the dynamic distribution of computing services across different servers, regardless of location, giving rise to the notion of “network as the platform”.

Sounds far fetched, are we there yet?

We are getting there and you don’t have to look far to see this happening already. There is this company out there that offers 15 cents per gigabyte storage each month, and 10 to 80 cents per hour for its server capacity, depending on configuration.

Another one offers a service that lets developers write Python-based applications and host them on its infrastructure at no cost with up to 500 MB of storage. Beyond that, it charges 10 to 12 cents per "CPU core hour" and 15-18 cents per gigabyte of storage.

By the way, the first company is Amazon and the second one is Google.

Yes, it’s Amazon the online bookstore and e-retailer, the one and the same. Its latest venture into cloud computing is called Amazon Web Services or AWS for short. It consists of 4 types of services – Simple Simple Storage Service (S3); Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2); Simple Queuing Service and SimpleDB.

In other words, Amazon now offers scalable storage, computer processing, message queuing, and a database management system as Internet plug-and-play services. Just how scalable is AWS? One of AWS’s customers Animoto.com developed a Facebook video application and it was so popular, the user base ramped from 25,000 to 250,000 in three days, scaling from 50 instances of EC2 to 3,500 (an instance is a copy of a program running on one or more server hardware and each instance may serve a particular group of users). If this had been running on a private, internal data center, it would have hit the wall right away.

These characteristics fulfilled the 3 tenets of cloud computing – scalable services at a variable cost over the Internet. Amazon claims that there are as many as 370,000 AWS users today.

Next : Why is Amazon doing cloud computing?

 

Article by: Gilbert Chang