Discovering the Value of the Cloud for the Business

Ramkumar Lakshminarayanan

With the advent of the cloud, an organization can try out a new application or even develop a new application without first investing in hardware, software, and networking.

This can have a positive impact on companies that want to innovate and experiment without risk.

Why Cloud Computing ?

Modeling Services

As we started our discussion about cloud computing we ran into the repetitive use of the adjective clause as a service.

For example, Infrastructure as a Service, Hardware as a Service, Applications as a Service, Software as a Service, and so on.

Services you purchase from these cloud service providers will be offered to you in a way that is similar to your television cable provider.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the delivery of a compute foundation (servers, networking technology, storage, and data center space) as a service. It also includes the delivery of operating systems and virtualization technology to manage the resources.

Visualize a scenario where the hardware and the Operating System (OS) are exposed as a Web Service over the public Internet. Based on the principles of Web Services, we could send a request to this service along with a few parameters.

Since the OS is expected to act as an interface to the CPU and the devices, we can potentially invoke a service that accepts a ‘job’ that will be processed by the OS and the underlying hardware. Technically, this Web Service has just turned the OS + H/W combination into a ‘Service’.

All that the Cloud OS offers is the infrastructure services.

You may choose to use REST API to manage this OS or use SSH or Remote Desktop console. Technically, when you are able to delegate a program to execute on a remote OS running on the Web, you are leveraging Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

This is different from classic web hosting. Web hosting only hosts web pages and cannot execute code that needs low level access to the OS API. Web hosting cannot dynamically scale on demand.

IaaS enables you to run your computing task on virtually unlimited number of machines.

Remember that through IaaS, you have just moved a server running in your backyard into the Cloud.

You pretty much own the managing, patching, securing and the health of the remote servers.

Amazon EC2 is an example of commercial IaaS offering.

Platform as a Service

With Platform as a Service (PaaS) the provider delivers more than infrastructure. It delivers what you can think of as a solution stack for both a software development and runtime environment.

Platform as a Service or PaaS goes one level above the Cloud OS.

Through this, developers can leverage a scalable platform to run their applications.

Developers always develop and deploy their applications on the application development platforms. Some of the most popular application development platforms are .NET and Java.

In the last scenario, we have seen how the OS + H/W combination is offered as a service. Now, imagine a scenario where the application development platform is offered to you as a service.

Through this, you will be able to develop and test your applications on a low end, inexpensive notebook PC but will able to ‘submit’ my code to run on the most powerful hardware infrastructure.

Examples of Platform as a Service include the Google AppEngine, Windows Azure, AppJet, Etelos, Qrimp, and Force.com, which is the official development environment for Salesforce.com

The advantage of PaaS is that the developers need not worry about installing, maintaining, securing and patching the server.

Software as a Service

This layer we refer to the situation where the service provider offers the customer the ability to run business applications that are hosted by the provider.

Today, most of the traditional desktop applications like word processors and spreadsheet packages are available over the web. These new breed of applications just need a browser and offer high fidelity with the desktop software.

This fundamentally changes the way software is deployed and licensed.

You need not double click setup.exe to install an Office suite on your desktop.

Just subscribe to the applications and the features that you need and only pay for what you use.

This is almost equivalent to exposing the application as a service.

These applications may be called as Cloud Applications.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a silent revolution in the world of traditional software products.

Consumers can now use inexpensive devices that are capable of connecting to the web to get their work done.

This reduces the upfront investment in software and brings the Pay-as-you-go model. Google Apps, Salesforce.com and Microsoft Online Services are examples of SaaS.

For IT Professionals, Cloud Computing is all about consolidation and outsourcing the infrastructure. They are typically focused on the Infrastructure as a Service.

Platform as a Service is an offering meant for developers and architects. They need to design applications keeping the statelessness of the Cloud.

If you have ever used Google Docs or Microsoft Live Mesh, you have already leveraging the Cloud. Consumers will subscribe to Software as a Service offerings.

Pay per use Instant Scalability Security Reliability APIs

Why Cloud Computing ?

Hosting can never meet the promise of elasticity. Even if it does, it won’t match the economics of the Cloud.

Hosting does offer some level of Self Service but not to an extent of manipulating the server.

Hosting vs. Cloud Computing

Pay-By-Use attribute is emulated by some hosting

companies. But, it is not a norm in the hosting business. Programmability is too expensive to be

supported by hosters as they cannot invest in the SDK and tools to manage the infrastructure.

So, it is clearly evident that hosting is not the same as Cloud Computing.

This is the most popular incarnation of the Cloud. Many businesses and individuals realize Cloud through the Public Cloud implementation.

It needs a huge investment and only well established companies with deep pockets like Microsoft, Amazon and Google can afford to set them up.

Public Clouds

For example, a London based business can choose to deploy their app at the Europe data center and an American company prefers a data center in North America.

With the geographical spread, Public Clouds like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Windows Azure also offer Content Delivery Network (CDN) features.

Through this, static content will be automatically replicated across all the data centers around the globe thus increasing the scalability and availability of the applications.

Private Clouds are normal data centers within an enterprise with all the 4 attributes of the Cloud – Elasticity, Self Service, Pay-By-Use and Programmability.

By setting up a Private Cloud, enterprises can consolidate their IT infrastructure. They will need fewer IT staff to manage the data center. They will also realize reduced power bills because of the low electricity consumption and lesser cooling equipment needs.

Private Cloud empowers employees within an organization through Self Service of their IT needs. It becomes easy to provision new machines and quickly assign them to project teams.

Private Cloud

Private Cloud borrows some of the best practices of Public Cloud but limited to an organizational boundary.

Private Cloud can be setup using a variety of offerings from vmWare, Microsoft, IBM, SUN and others. There are also some of the Open Source implementations like Eucalyptus and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.

There are scenarios where you need a combination of Private Cloud and Public Cloud.

Due to the regulations and compliance issues in few countries, sensitive data like citizen information, patient medical history, and financial transactions cannot be stored in servers that physically not located within the political boundaries of a country.

Hybrid Cloud

In some scenarios, the enterprise customers want to get best of the both worlds by logically connecting their Private Cloud and the Public Cloud.

Through this, they can offer seamless scalability by moving some of the on premise and Private Cloud based applications to the Public Cloud.

Security plays a critical role in connecting the Private Cloud to the Public Cloud.

Amazon Web Services has recently announced Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) that securely bridges Private Cloud and Amazon Web Services.

It is almost like extending your infrastructure beyond the organizational boundary and the firewall in a secure way.

Microsoft’s recent announcement of Windows AppFabric brings the concept of Hybrid Cloud to Microsoft’s future customers.

Community Cloud is implemented when a set of businesses have a similar requirement and share the same context. This would be made available to a set of select organizations.

For example Government of India Reserve Bank of India

A Community Cloud Goes Beyond an organization.

Community Cloud