Clouds are rolling in, do you hear the rumble ?

If internet was the “it” during the late 90’s and early 2000’s, now cloud computing is the new “it” .  Cloud computing has changed the way businesses design their infrastructure. IT used to be a costly resource before cloud computing moved into the neighborhood. Lets take a few step back, in the late 80 and early 90 all applications and databases were hosted on physical servers stacked up, then it became pizza box size servers that was racked in an enclosure, then came the blade technology. In the late 90s virtual machines came around. VMware, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, RedHat etc came up with different VM technology that enabled IT to consolidate and virtualize multiple server images onto one or more physical servers.

VM revolutionized the way IT architectural design and deployments were done. Instead of buying additional physical server for new applications or to scale up the existing servers, we were able to spin up new virtual servers in a matter of minutes or hours. Resource capacity was dynamically added or removed from each VM according to the requirements and was no longer a case of waiting for weeks for the memory and CPU to arrive and getting it installed. Life was becoming easy. However the VM  gear is not cheap.  Depending on the requirements, the VM host servers and softwares needed to be big enough to handle all the VM image with enough  capacity to handle scalability.  VM was just perfect for medium to large IT shops.  Big players in the VM arena like VMware, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, HP, Xen and so on made tremendous improvement in their VM solutions.  IT shops were quickly able to P-to-V (Physical to Virtual) servers, spin up new application and database server and so on. Few years ago to create a new development, testing or QA environment took weeks to build out, with VM solutions system administrators are able to create new environments a lot quicker. VM environment also gave redundancy to a certain level. If one of the VM hosts has an issue, VM or system administrator are able dynamically move the VM image to another host (in VMware world its called V-Motion) within a matter of seconds or minutes.

However,the VM solution came with a cost.  It needed new skill sets.  Even though regular  system administrators can design , allocate and manage the resources to  VM images, its recommended to have VM specialists you can be dedicated to monitor the various VM images and dynamically manage and balance the VM host servers.  Just like any clustered servers, its important that you do not over burden the servers so that should you have a hardware or software failure the secondary server(if any) does not starve.  Be careful with licensing model on VM servers, it could be different from  physical servers.

During late 90s and early 2000’s, cloud computing started become popular.  Amazon one of the leading cloud computing provider developed the cloud architecture for their internal use as a strategy to optimize their datacenter.  Later in 2006, Amazon launched the now famous Amazon Web Services (AWS), their cloud computing offering to the public. Soon followed by Google, GoGrid, Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce, Rackspace, RightScale and so on. Cloud computing celebrates its 5th anniversary this month !

So whats this cloud computing ? I am sure you have heard multiple definitions of cloud computing. Here is one:  Its a large group of servers pooled together to deliver scalable computing power over the internet.  With cloud computing offering you now get software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Business can scale their IT infrastructure  up and down as their demand fluctuates and no longer have to invest large capital to gear up.  Many of these cloud computing providers offer many software templates that you can subscribe that will instantly have your application or database environment ready and configured for use in matter of minutes. And when your user base increase and you need to add capacity you can dynamically add them and remove them when you don’t need it. Since your environment is part of a large farm of servers, there is automatic redundancy for your server instance.

What does it mean for IT ?  Well, in nutshell, IT does not have to be very complicated. IT division does not have to maintain all those hundreds of servers, so less personnel, don’t need to worry about capacity planning and capital expenditure, network access across and so on.  IT can now concentrate on development and business alignment a lot more. For instance, if the business decides to use google apps for their emailing and document , then the IT does not have to worry about maintaining a Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes or Apple Mail servers. Similarly, Google Docs will take care of their desktop publishing, spreadsheet, calendars, etc.  Salesforce.com offers CRM solutions that will save the company a large amount of capital investment and maintenance.

You probably use Gmail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail or something similar. Its pretty much part of cloud computing. Most of the cloud based email providers are now offering a LOT of space if not unlimited space. As you accumulate more email, they keep increasing the space. We don’t have to manage the space or the workload on it, as we reach the size limit, we ask for more space (for some you have to pay for it) and as we need to add more users, with a click of a button or two a new user can be easily added or removed.  We never worry about system load or memory, its all been taken care of the cloud provider.

Almost all cloud providers has a pay as you go plan as well as reserved capacity pricing. Small to Medium can definitely take advantage of this costing model since there is no need for major capital investments on hardware and software.  However, if you are paranoid or your security realm prohibits data on the public cloud you can definitely opt for private clouds for a premium price.  Private cloud will completely isolate the infrastructure from other users. Not that public cloud will allow other users to access your data.  People get confused and paranoid when they hear public cloud and feel that their data is out there in public. Thats not the case, your data is complete secured with a token and a userid and password.  With a private cloud you can wall off your resources  and  restrict access to your resource almost as if they are on your own hardware and software.  Here is a good video that explains the private cloud

Cloud does come with certain limitations and cons. Just like the saying “nothing is really free”.   Even though its all secured, your data is still on the cloud.  Network security on the cloud is maintained by the cloud provider and not by you. You have no control over how the provider implements their security.  Similarly, if the cloud infrastructure goes down your business goes down. Recent Amazon, Google and Microsoft cloud (link) outages have send a shiver to few business who are using cloud computing or who are thinking of going cloud computing.  My take on it, its a new technology that is evolving at an astronomical pace and is not different than outages and oops caused by internal IT operations.

Business should definitely start looking into cloud. It may not be total replacement solution, but definitely can save a great deal of money on certain areas of infrastructure especially if you are a multi national business with IT , business and management spread across the globe.  These videos gives an overview of cloud:
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In this cost reduction economy every business is on the hunt on improving their cash flow.  SaaS, IaaS and PaaS certainly will help businesses reduce huge capital expenditure and reduce and optimize the cost of running the business.  They just have to cross the anxiety curve and relearn how to design their IT.

On the next couple of post I will show you how to setup cloud databases that your business can leverage instead of buying dedicated hardware and database software.