In response to yet another mainstream press bungling of “cloud and cloud computing”, Lori MacVittie offers a clear and concise cloud computing delineation: “Users use Applications. Applications use clouds.” Lori expands on this point:
“Cloud computing is not a synonym for cloud. And vice-versa. Cloud computing is perhaps the first case of “technology for technology’s sake” that is actually a good thing. That’s because cloud computing is for applications. It’s not for users, it’s for applications. A cloud computing environment without an application is pretty much useless. A dynamic collection of compute resources that remains unfulfilled, idly spinning disks and catching CPU interrupts willy nilly without purpose.
Users, i.e. consumers, never really interact with a cloud computing environment, they interact with an application. Many folks identify SaaS (Software as a Service) as “cloud” because many of the properties associated with cloud computing – scalability, multi-tenancy, on-demand usage and dynamic adjustment to capacity – are inherently part of the offering. That may – or may not – be because the underlying infrastructure on which those applications are deployed is, in fact, a cloud computing infrastructure.”
“…Let’s say that again: an application is not “a cloud”, its supporting infrastructure and environment are “a cloud.” An application may be a cloud-based application or service, but it is never, ever a “cloud” itself nor are you using “cloud computing” by simple virtue of accessing that application. You are using an application, the application is using cloud computing.”
After a much appreciated reference to my cloud-o-gram, Lori continues with an analogy to the SOA-world:
“A “cloud” is really an architecture that exhibits particular characteristics (on-demand, multi-tenant, rapid elasticity, resource pooling) that enable applications deployed atop that architecture to appear “infinitely scalable.” Saying an application is or is not cloud is like saying an application is or is not SOA. The application may leverage a SOA, it may be comprised of services (a “composite application”) but it is not SOA. It can’t be because SOA is an architecture, a design and deployment model, a means of interaction between services.”
So, the next time you witness cloud / cloud computing bungling, repeat after Lori: “an application is not “a cloud”, its supporting infrastructure and environment are “a cloud.””
Tagged as:
F5,
Lori MacVittie
Posted by brenda michelson at 1:47 pm in Cloud Watch, SaaS, cloud computing environment (cce), cloud-o-gram, fundamentals, services architecture | Permalink
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In IBM’s November 2009 SOA Newsletter, Fill Bowen, Program Manager responsible for Smart SOA in IBM Software Group, discusses the relationship between SOA and Cloud Computing, and shares prerequisites for providing services in a cloud and consuming services in a cloud.
The newsletter emphasizes that SOA and Cloud Computing are complements. SOA is an architectural style, while Cloud Computing is a deployment model. These concepts can come together in the design of the cloud computing environment:
"’SOA is an architectural style for building applications, loosely coupled, allowing composition,’ says Jerry Cuomo, CTO of IBM’s WebSphere business. ‘Can we build a datacenter infrastructure on SOA principles? Yes, and that’s the cloud, so it’s a service-oriented infrastructure,’ he adds. ‘It’s taking that architectural principle of SOA and applying it to an infrastructure.’" – InfoWorld, “The cloud-SOA connection”
In discussing the SOA-Cloud Computing relationship, Fill offers a helpful analogy using books and a library:
“An interesting analogy for cloud and SOA is to think of books in a library. The books represent the services that customers can access once the library acquires them, and the library building represents the cloud where people come to check out the books/services. Books are reusable, and several books might make up a series or topic. Someone writes the book once and it is reused many times.
Using our analogy of books in the library, there are two components to consider when thinking about services in a cloud environment. One is the providing of services (books) to the cloud (library). And the other is the consuming (checking out) of those services (books). Each has different requirements.”
Read the article to learn of the prerequisites for providing and consuming services in a cloud.
[Disclosure: IBM is not a direct client of my firm, Elemental Links, however IBM is a founding sponsor of the SOA Consortium, which is a client.]
Tagged as:
Fillmore Bowen,
IBM,
soa
Posted by brenda michelson at 11:11 am in Cloud Watch, cloud computing environment (cce), fundamentals, governance, provider positions, services architecture, virtualization | Permalink
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This week, Gartner is holding a Data Center Conference in Vegas. A press release from this morning is on private vs. public cloud spend by IT organizations:
“Despite the economies of scale offered by public cloud providers, private cloud services will prevail for the foreseeable future while public cloud offerings mature, according to Gartner, Inc. Through 2012, IT organizations will spend more money on private cloud computing investments than on offerings from public cloud providers.
Gartner defines public cloud computing as a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to external customers using Internet technologies. Private cloud computing is defined as a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to internal customers using Internet technologies.”
Compared dollars to dollars, this statement is pretty much a no-brainer. Private cloud computing requires investments in hardware, software and operations. Consuming public cloud computing offerings is essentially pay-as-you-go. I say essentially, because an organization may deploy licensed software to a public cloud computing environment (CCE), and may invest in application and software management tooling to facilitate/orchestrate cloud computing. Both models require process, and possibly, portfolio changes.
Aside from the dollar base comparison, I do agree with the sentiment of the release, that organizations will employ a hybrid (private-public CCE) adoption pattern.
““The hype of cloud computing is that existing IT architectures and processes can be simply replaced by the cloud," said Tom Bittman, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “The reality of the future IT organization, however, is somewhat a combination. Larger enterprises will continue to have an IT organization that manages and deploys IT resources internally, some of which will be ‘private clouds.’ IT organizations will also take on IT service sourcing responsibility, determining when to leverage external providers, when to deploy internally, and when to leverage both for specific services.”
Private cloud services will be a stepping stone to future public cloud services and, over time, will span both private and public cloud resources in a hybrid manner. For many large enterprises, private cloud services will therefore be required for many years, perhaps decades, as public cloud offerings mature.
Gartner analysts said appropriate investments in private cloud computing will also make it easier for enterprises to gradually use public cloud services in the future. For services destined to be cloud at some point in time, enterprises should evaluate the return on investment from developing private cloud services, while waiting for external offerings to mature.
“Many of the investments in private cloud computing will prepare the enterprise for public cloud computing. These investments are not just technology changes — they are also process, cultural and business interface changes,” said Mr. Bittman. “Making these changes sooner rather than later will help enterprises to take better cloud sourcing decisions and potentially make for an easier transition to public cloud computing.””
The release continues with recommendations around organization models and a “three-point action plan for CIOs and infrastructure and operation leaders”. Read the release.
Tagged as:
Gartner,
hybrid,
private cloud,
public cloud,
Tom Bittman
Posted by brenda michelson at 10:37 am in Cloud Watch, adoption, adoption patterns, analyst positions, cloud computing environment (cce) | Permalink
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Gartner Fellows Neil MacDonald and David Mitchell Smith spoke with Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft, “to discuss his vision for cloud computing, and the impact on enterprise computing and the IT industry.” Their conversation has been published as a Gartner RAS Core Research Note (G00172235), and made available for public consumption via a Microsoft reprint.
Published Key Findings:
- “Ozzie’s (and thus, Microsoft’s) vision of cloud computing emphasizes hybrid enterprise/cloud computing, where organizations choose when and where computing takes place locally versus in cloud-based infrastructure, and emphasizes that the on-premises and cloud-based solutions work seamlessly together.
- As with early encryption issues, Ozzie believes that security and privacy issues will be addressed as the industry matures in a combination of legislative advances, as well as industry cooperation.
- Ozzie’s vision for cloud computing includes system infrastructure, an application platform and finished applications being delivered as a service.
- Microsoft is investing in its own data centers because it must in order to provide its consumer-based services. It believes it is helping to lead the industry in providing innovations in data center architectures.
- Ozzie believes the future of cloud computing is in the experience delivered via a browser across multiple devices — mobile, PC and TV-type screens — which is a vision he refers to as "three screens and a cloud." “
The entire report is well-worth the read.
A quick excerpt on Ozzie’s hybrid model vision:
"Ozzie: I believe in a hybrid model. I fundamentally, deeply believe in a hybrid model at the experience side and at the back-end side.
At the back-end side, it depends on the size of enterprise and the workload, as well as the segment of the enterprise and whether it is highly regulated or whatever. The decisions regarding what to keep on-premises versus what to distribute into the cloud will vary dramatically. Very small businesses will put almost everything into the cloud. Very large businesses will put all their infrastructural systems, such as mail, phone systems and document management, into the cloud. Enterprise applications that have high integration requirements and a lot of legacy issues will stay on-premises. What happens in the middle is a mix."
“…But again, it’s a hybrid architecture. If you don’t have the center, then you can’t rendezvous. You can’t find each other. You can’t connect in any way, shape or form. However, if you don’t have the edge, then you don’t have the agility. You pay for ingress and egress when you don’t have to.”
Tagged as:
David Mitchell Smith,
Gartner,
microsoft,
Neil MacDonald,
Ray Ozzie
Posted by brenda michelson at 9:32 am in Cloud Watch, cloud computing environment (cce), data center advances, provider positions, software architecture | Permalink
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On Friday, Sebastian Rupley posted a list of 11 Top Open-source Resources for the Cloud Computing. The opening:
“Open-source software has been on the rise at many businesses during the extended economic downturn, and one of the areas where it is starting to offer companies a lot of flexibility and cost savings is in cloud computing. Cloud deployments can save money, free businesses from vendor lock-ins that could really sting over time, and offer flexible ways to combine public and private applications. The following are 11 top open-source cloud applications, services, educational resources, support options, general items of interest, and more.”
As you may have noticed, the article lists 11, but my post title says “10”. That is intentional, one of the listed resources is Zoho, which is not an open source product. Check out the article to learn about offerings from Eucalyptus Systems, RedHat, CloudEra, Enomaly, OpenNebula and more. Be sure to read the comments, for additional resources.
Tagged as:
CloudEra,
Enomaly,
Eucalyptus,
GigaOm,
Hadoop,
OpenNebula,
RedHat,
Sebastian Rupley
Posted by brenda michelson at 10:26 am in Cloud Watch, cloud computing environment (cce), cloud computing offering, cloud offering, open source | Permalink
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On October 28, 2009 Joyent announced the launch of a cloud computing platform in China:
“Joyent becomes China’s first Cloud Computing vendor at a time where computing infrastructure is in very high demand. The company’s data center is located in the Qinhuangdao Economic and Technological Development Zone (QETDZ), Hebei Province, China. This announcement coincides with the QETDZ’s Investment Attraction Week.
“China is the world’s fastest growing economy and Joyent is there with the country’s first local Cloud Computing offering”, said David Young, CEO and Founder of Joyent. “This is definitely a very exciting and positive move for Joyent. We would especially like to thank our partners, QETDZ and Intel for their support in making this expansion possible. We are looking forward to providing the Chinese developer community and China’s enterprises with world-leading Cloud Computing technology.””
In a related blog post, Joyent spoke of the initial offering, the customer base and the ethical considerations:
“Today, we have opened a limited service of the Joyent Cloud to customers within mainland China and will be opening to the general public later this year. We are happy to be working with Intel and the Qinhuangdao Economic and Technology Development Zone, to bring the best infrastructure cloud computing service to customers in the Peoples’ Republic of China.
Joyent offers the best cloud for one of the fastest growing economies in the world today. Joyent will be bringing our full line of services to mainland China. We have been very impressed by the entrepreneurial and geek spirit of customers we have meet in China. Further, we have been very impressed by the open spirit of the officials of the development zone as their vision leap frogs server-hugging infrastructure for the future of the cloud: Joyent. We are excited to bring the Joyeur spirit to China.
Does our presence in China represent an ethical problem for Joyent? Isn’t the Chinese government known for censoring the internet? How can Joyent take part in that system? By entering the Chinese market, Joyent is signing up to play by the rules of the Chinese market. Joyent’s presence in the Chinese marketplace is our commitment to participate in the on-going conversation that is China moving between the systems of the past, and the aspirations of Joyent’s customers of the future. Joyent could not participate in the Chinese market were this conversation not vibrant and developing brilliantly…”
——–
Briefly: Why is this important?
1. Global expansion, particularly to an enormous market such as China, represents a boon for cloud computing in general, and specifically, is a big win for Joyent.
2. Given China’s potential as a true economic power, read competitive threat, it’s interesting to consider how that might be accelerated by sharing computational resources, therefore decreasing lead times and capital outlays for individual enterprises.
Tagged as:
China,
economy,
Joyent
Posted by brenda michelson at 10:55 am in Cloud Watch, cloud computing environment (cce), economics | Permalink
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