Cloud Computing: A New Paradigm in the IT Industry

As the IT field evolves, it becomes more mature, the need to optimize costs naturally drives innovation and creativity. The new concept along with the technology, which is now making the rounds is ‘cloud computing’.

I came across people with limited IT knowledge asking me what ‘cloud computing’ is. Although I tried to explain it to them in the best possible way, most of the time I end up with a blank look at them, indicating that they did not understand the concept or background behind cloud computing.

What is cloud computing?

Recently, I started giving you examples of home with kitchen Vs restaurant to explain the concept behind ‘cloud computing’. A kitchen in the home is dedicated to the home, the resources, be it the containers or the appliances, or the person who cooks is dedicated to that home. The homeowner invests in the kitchen and takes advantage of the benefit of having the kitchen for himself or the members of his family. It is the owner of the house who has to maintain the kitchen. When one compares home cooking to that of a restaurant, the end goal is the same, which is the specific food that is offered, but the way the food is prepared or served is different. One does not own anything in a restaurant except for the food it offers. Simply put, the same is the concept between traditional IT offering and cloud computing.

Like home cooking, in the case of traditional IT offering, the company owns the hardware and software licenses, and sometimes the company outsources application development to a third party, which is comparable to the hired chef ( if you are a rich person) to prepare food at home. . With the evolution of the IT sector in hardware and software, we are moving towards the ‘restaurant’ model of IT services; You only pay for what is your end goal: ‘processed foods’ or ‘services’. As in a restaurant, in which you are only concerned with the quality of the food and the expected service and you are not very concerned about who the chef, the waiter or the appliances or even where the kitchen is, is the case of “computing in Cloud”. ‘, the customer focuses on the service offering and not on the hardware, software, raw information or resources used to provide the service offering or the final product.

Organizations are not going to jump into cloud computing, they will evolve and move towards the characteristics of cloud computing infrastructure over a period of time as they feel confident about the same. When it comes to cloud computing, I think we are in a similar stage to the early 90’s when it comes to outsourcing IT services. IT services were outsourced so the organization could focus on the ‘core’ business area; cloud computing could well be a step further.

Now, let’s take a look at the service models that are typically considered in cloud computing.

SAaS: Software – as – a service:

This model has been talked about for quite some time, business applications are hosted on servers maintained by data centers. Legal issues, security, integration and data confidentiality of the deterrents of this model at this time. Once policies, procedures, and standards are defined and refined over a period of time, they are likely to be adopted over a period of time.

In terms of use, the application is accessed through the web browser and the terms and conditions may be governed by service level agreements.

Possible examples could be anything from a simple free generic email service to a complex ERP system.

IaaS: Infrastructure – as – a service:

Compute servers, storage, hardware are considered under this service model. You would also find free storage offered on the web, this could be called IaaS.

PaaS: Platform – as – a service:

The development and deployment platform could be offered as a service to developers to create, deploy, and manage applications on SAaS.

If one looks at the cloud deployment strategy, they are typically public, private, and hybrid clouds. I feel like the name itself is significant enough to describe the guy.

The next question is, what kind of hardware is required to host cloud computing?

At this time, cloud computing is typically implemented on the traditional model. By traditional model, I mean that one could have a server to serve the database level or the application level, which is almost a “silo” based model. But from cloud computing, you need to have efficient hardware and manpower (see my restaurant example) to better manage the cloud in a data center. This is where hardware could play a major role, new technology such as network computing, real application clusters, automatic storage management, server scaling, and server virtualization features play an important role for better cloud management and implementation.

As we move forward, we may well be moving away from the ‘Silos’ based computing system and application. The cloud computing infrastructure would reside in the data center, this would require efficient use of hardware and more manpower would be required to support multiple servers or applications. Optimization and effective control would play a greater role in managing the infrastructure from these data centers towards cloud computing.

Standards in cloud computing are evolving, and according to a leading standards organization, some of the key characteristics of cloud computing are:

Pooling resources:The provider’s computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model. There is a sense of location independence in the sense that the customer generally has no control or knowledge over the exact location of the resources provided.

Quick elasticity: Capacities can be elastically provisioned and released, in some cases automatically, to rapidly scale in and out according to demand. To the consumer, the capacities available for provisioning often seem limitless and can be appropriated in any quantity and at any time.

Measured service: Cloud systems automatically monitor and optimize resource usage by leveraging a metrics capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (eg, storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). The use of resources can be monitored, controlled and reported, which provides transparency for both the provider and the consumer of the service used.

Since this leads to a situation where cloud computing must provide services where there is no downtime and resources are shared, so naturally the hardware for cloud computing is evolving, the technology related to grid computing, clustering – RAC, servers and better performance servers. Vendors are increasingly offering virtualization to meet the characteristics of cloud computing.

A brief look at the terminology and technology used,

A cluster consists of a group of independent but interconnected computers whose combined resources can be applied to a processing task. A ‘clusterware’ is a term used to describe software that provides interfaces and services that enable and support a cluster. The combination of clusterware and automatic storage management provides a unified cluster solution that is the foundation of the real application cluster database.

Real application clusters allow multiple nodes in a clustered system to mount and open a single database that resides on shared disk storage. If a single system (node) fails, the database service will continue to be available on the remaining nodes.

It may take a few more years for cloud computing to mature, and it may well redefine the IT outsourcing roadmap.

The author is a PMP Certified Professional and writes his own blog at http://indian-amps.blogspot.com