GeekGirl

Cloud Computing

By Karen

Stay with me on this one, I know its not a topic I usually tackle but I think its something we need to talk about when we are discussing Enterprise2.0 and Social Networking. If we are talking more and more about loosely coupled services and quick on demand applications and the digital natives are demanding this be online, then we are talking about a more cloud oriented architecture.

This thought may horrify some enterprise customers because they haven’t even managed to get to grips with the overly complicated service oriented architecture, never mind the CIO waking up in a cold sweat at the thought of the security issues that go along with placing your trusted data “out there” in the fluffy part of a network diagram. The bit they normally try to lock their employees out of, not encourage them to develop applications for!

Its not just fashion that is cyclical. We have gone from large central database mainframe days, to distributed personal computing power and now we are moving back towards large data centres. But this time it makes sense for all kinds of reasons to put your trust in the cloud.

Advantages of the cloud from Wikipedia

Location of infrastructure in areas with lower costs of real estate and electricity.
Sharing of peak-load capacity among a large pool of users, improving overall utilization.
Separation of infrastructure maintenance duties from domain-specific application development.
Separation of application code from physical resources.
Ability to use external assets to handle peak loads (not having to engineer for highest possible load levels).
Not having to purchase assets for one-time or infrequent intensive computing tasks.
Ability to scale to meet changing user demands quickly, usually within minutes

So what is holding back this wondrous new age? We have the fabulous data links and there are enough high powered data centres out there. It’s the old question of standards and interoperability. I came across an article the other day that makes a proposal on a few new layers that could be standardised in a cloud computing system.

David Young at Joyent has his “cloud nine” common cloud proposal. It has nine core components:

Virtualisation Layer Network Stability
API for Creation, Deletion, Cloning of Instances
Application Layer Interoperability
State Layer Interoperability
Application Services (e.g. email infrastructure, payments infrastructure)
Automatic Scale (deploy and forget about it)
Hardware Load Balancing
Storage as a Service
“Root”, If Required

So in the future you can simply buy your processor power from somebody, change your storage requirements and provider on the fly and experience true on demand computing. Even better, if you have spare capacity, simply plug into the cloud and offer it. Kind of like being able to put power back into the grid if you have generated it and don’t need it.

What do you think? Should the IEEE (for example) be stepping in now to start engineering an open cloud computing system for the benefits of the internet? My vote is yes.

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