The concept has not changed much:
When you think of Cloud?
June 9th, 2010Get to know these for sure :
-Virtualization ( it hides the complexity of underlying software/hardware/management/security)
-Virtual Machines
-Kernel based Virtual Machine(KVM)
-Bare metal machines
-Virtual machine provisioning
-Bare metal machine provisioning
-Hypervisors (OS / Hardware)
-Middlewares
-Single Sign-on
-Virtual Machine Management
-Virtual Machine Monitor
-Virtual Machine Migration
-Virtual Machine Scalability
-Cloud offering Virtual Machine service
-Cloud offering Bare metal machine service
-Multi-tenancy, Shared hosting, Private hosting
- Return on Investment (ROI)
-Operational Cost
-Service Level Agreement (SLA: often you come across this)
-Geographical location of the Cloud hosting for storage, computation, transactions and many other criteria.
- As a Service concept
- Accounting, Book keeping mechanisms
-Payment models/mechanisms
- Types/Flavors of Cloud
- Cloud Vendors in IaaS/HaaS, PaaS ,SaaS and EaaS
-Business model of the vendors (how they charge for bandwidth, vms, storage, time, cpu time, memory, hardware, service)
-Cost Calculator for usage
-How to build a private cloud?
-How to use a public cloud ?
-How to customize for hybrid cloud option?
-What are the limitations of Cloud?
-What we imagined about Cloud ?
-What can we do with the Cloud?
-What are basic requirements to connect to the Cloud?
Hope not to see flavors of the Cloud
June 9th, 2010As we all know, part of the IT community is already on the cloud bandwagon whether one likes it or not. Some are reluctant; until the cloud and the customers using the cloud are cloud aware and know the pros and cons of using it. The reluctants’ will wait and later make the transition when the “Cloud” is globally accepted as secure and robust in hosting infrastructure, platform and as a service delivery highway.
Vendors/ASPs: They want to be on the cloud bandwagon, to show that they are aware of the cloud and call themselves cloud experts for the future on gaining experience and knowledge and to have a time line that they supported “cloud” since XXXX year. This is kind of cloud feather in the hat.
Until and unless the end users are not cloud aware or they are not trained or educated about the “Cloud”, it is going to be difficult. The end users have to be transitioned to the new paradigm of “Cloud” “as a service” “SLA” dragging them to think different from their traditional software nurturing.
This is the difficult part, no one is ready to transition at once. So flavors of cloud would be formed. I called it flavors because this is going to happen, it has happened in the part, characteristically defining or naming the technology. I know it seems weird but this is going to be case
Cloud is a “SUPERSET” and rest of them are subsets, see below:
1) Multi-tenant Cloud
2) Optimized Cloud
3) Homogeneous Cloud
4) Heterogeneous Cloud
5) Green Cloud
6) Hybrid/Mixed Cloud
7) “Application” Cloud (Application could be replaced by a product name)
Private Cloud
9) Public Cloud
10) Virtual Private Cloud
11) Service Cloud
12) Crowd Cloud
13) “Company” Cloud ( Company could be replaced by a company name)
14) Universal Cloud
15) Geographic Cloud ( Cloud in X country, Y country, Z country)
16) High Availability Cloud
17) Visualization Cloud
18) Hardware Cloud ( Hardware can be replaced with CPU, GPGPU, GPU, Cells)
With the current “market place” , ‘app store”, “online store” where one can write applications using respective , supported API’s ( by Apple, Microsoft, Google and many others), cloud has just become the hosting platform for “Virtual IT Company”.
so on. Please excuse me if you think differently. It is kind of mixed and untamed information.
Infrastructure as a Service
May 18th, 2010Infrastructure + as a Service:
- Infrastructure ==> Servers + Operating System (Virtual Machine’s), bare metal servers, Storage, inter-connect, geographical location
- as a Service ==> get the Infrastructure on subscription and pay for what you use basis.
Please note the word “on demand” & “as a service”: if you want 100 machines (virtual machines) or 100 physical bare mental machines or 100 Terabytes of storage in the next 30 machines you can get it from a IaaS vendor on blazing your credit card. One can use this infrastructure (scalable) for 1 to N hours and shut it down and pay for the usage.
Requirements: ( Please note Mac OS Virtual Machine-VM is not available on the Cloud)
1) High Speed (preferred) Internet connection (a must)
2) PC / Mac / Laptop
3) OS Linux, Windows or Mac OSX (Remote Desktop Terminal)
4) Credit Card ( Visa , Master Card, etc )
Cloud with Virtual Machines:
Once your Virtual Machine is launched on the cloud you get a VM similar to new machine with an operating system and no crap installed (trialwares)
Cloud with Bare metal machines:
Once you are allocated a machine on the cloud you get a new machine with operating system and no crap installed (trialwares)
After this one can install any applications or software like we normally do on our desktops or laptops or servers. It is a not a big deal ! but hats off to the provisioning , billing and management tools that does this. One can install their applications, save the image and again scale it from 1 to N VMs/bare metals in less than 30 minutes.
What is provisioning on the Cloud with VMs and Cloud with bare metal machines?
Say you have a 100 node cluster sitting in one room.
If you need 10 nodes to run windows and 90 nodes to run Linux , then the provisioning tools are used. At the same time if you change your mind and want 50 machines to be Linux and rest to be windows. Currently you can do it on the fly, but once you have the Cloud toolkit deployed on the bare metal, you can achieve this dynamically.
IaaS :
Cloud with Virtual Machines:
1) Amazon EC2
2) GoGrid
3) Joyent Cloud
4) Rackspace Cloud
5) Terremark Enterprise Cloud
6) Flexiscale
7) VMware cloud
Nimbus
9) GridGain
Cloud with bare metal machines:
1) NewServer : Bare metal Cloud
cpu gpu parallel distributed computing
May 14th, 2010Multi-tasking: One machine
Parallel Computing: One machine
GPU Computing: One machine on a graphics card
CPU + GPU Computing: Identify the parallel and sequential tasks/parts/sections of a program or application and schedule them on CPU and GPU accordingly within a machine.
Distributed Computing: Networked machines
Grid Computing: Networked machines
Cloud Computing: Can be one machine on network or ??
Please get the definitions of these and compare. Industry is amalgamating everything in terms of definitions, there is no standard definition anymore.
There was a comparable difference and acceptance when “Grid ” terminology is/was used. Now it is “Cloud – on demand, dynamic provisioning, grow and shrink, pay per use” and I am sure, it wont take a microsecond to change from “Cloud” to something else. Just back it up with big corporation , advertise it, get good customer testimonials and now you are into new space. It is strange !!
1) Larrabee Processor
2) AMD Fusion Processor
3) GPUGRID
4) Hoopoe Cloud
Cloud Bandwagon
May 13th, 2010Mainframes – not affordable only large companies could afford it. The length of the bandwagon was less. There was no suffixation or affixation on the software products with respect to letter “M” . Mainframe
Cluster Computing – affordable when end users started to build their cluster from CoTs (commodity off-the shelf ). There was no suffixation or affixation on the software products with respect to letter “C” . Most of the high performance stuff weather modeling, drug design, fluid dynamics and other time critical situation.
Distributed Computing – If huge/large/complex tasks takes much time (10days) to give results on one computer, then divide this complex task into simple tasks and distribute to computers connected and distributed across the network and get the work done in 1 hour. None of the software products have any suffixation and affixation of letter “D”.
Most of the idle cycle processing stealing or harvesting systems (Creeper and Reaper – Xerox PARC) and passionate projects to find extra-terrestrial (Seti@home), folding@home and link http://distributedcomputing.info/projects.html
Grid Computing – amalgamation of the above computing technologies with new terminologies such as virtual organisations, utility computing, on demand computing, disruptive computing, autonomic computing. Grid computing was more nurtured at the academic research and less by the industry.
From here on everyone started to use “G” in front of their product names.
Sometimes “G” might refer to Globus toolkit , toolkit to build grid environments.
Cloud Computing – Technology is kind of the same but the logic has changed with ROI in mind. The current recession has helped lot of small medium businesses or small medium enterprises to adopt and subscribe to cloud services.
If you come across “as a Service” tag, then it is related to cloud.
1) Dynamic provisioning
2) Multi-tenancy
3) Fast deployment
4) Easy load balancing
5) Dynamic storage
6) Pay for what you use
How safe is the Cloud ?
May 12th, 2010We all know that machines behind the personal or corporate firewall are not safe, it might be due to Operating System patch not being patched or security hole in the application and many others. If these exists without being on the cloud. On hosting our code/apps/services we are bound to many problems.
Many of the companies might not reveal that they are offering services via cloud, so to keep the customers happy and not scared, until they gain the popularity, name and support from the market.
1) Multi-tenancy is a problem: Do not know who are watching/scanning/downloading our data. If many are sharing the system, then the performance is low.
Commonly asked / given example is : content based advertisements in Gmail. There might be future projects in progress on the cloud services which might be based on the content of the storage on the cloud.
Note: Multi-tenancy is having multiple users owning shared part of system. For example we can multiple tenants renting the same house without being noticed by each other.
2) Data redundancy: Paranoid to keep backups at all time (keep one copy locally and one on the cloud), they still believe cloud is not matured. Internet connection with high bandwidth is necessary which is an added requirement.
3) Also being asked number of times, is data encrypted on the storage
1) How safe is the cloud ?
2) Does the SLA insure this ?
3) When our SaaS is running on the IaaS/HaaS ? and the problem is due to the IaaS compromise. Whom to ask/blame for SLA ?
End user is asking us and we are asking the IaaS/HaaS.
What are the precautions to be taken while using Cloud services ?
Namely IaaS , PaaS, SaaS and HaaS.
Whether “Patriot Act” help in these cases:
How can we build the confidence of the customer or early adopters to the cloud, in these situations? Usually, when we introduce the customer/early adopters to the cloud, these are the startup questions for any of us ? How to tackle these ?
Types of Cloud
May 6th, 2010Private Cloud : Private to a company or individual user.
Private multi-tenancy meaning, multiple end users/customers of the same domain/company.
Public Cloud: Publicly accessible by a company or individual user.
Public multi-tenancy meaning, multiple ends users/customers of the same or different domain/company
Hybrid Cloud: Private cloud + Public Cloud (flexible infrastructure)
Wireless Cloud: I heard this on the cloud discussion group on Google. Social networks (Orkut, Facebook, Myspace), messaging (twitter, buzz, etc) is influencing the wireless cloud.
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_grid
Trillion dollar Industry
May 1st, 2010Every industry has changed from past to present. Amazed to see something offered in a virtualized environment would grow to such an extent.
Taipei, April 29 (CNA) The Executive Yuan approved a draft bill Thursday on the development of cloud computing — outsourcing online data storage and applications — and making it a new industrial sector in Taiwan worth over NT$1 trillion (US$31.85 billion).
Reference: http://www.etaiwannews.com/etn/news_content.php?id=1241132&lang=eng_news&cate_img=35.jpg&cate_rss=news_Business