The 3!

Cloud Computing is the convergence if three major trends

Virtualization
Utility Computing and
Software as a Service

This is how the story goes,

We got the internet and broadband got very cheap.Some smart folks realized that not everyone had to build in house data centers. They realized that the computer running the application can be pretty far away from the person using it and only a fast connection was needed between them. This led to Software as a Service.Essentially something like a big fast machine on some one else's data centre running an application that we access using our familiar web browser.

Someone owns the application and we pay a fixed subscription fee.

Utility computing provides on-demand infrastructure with the ability to control, scale, and configure that infrastructure.

However a one size fits all approach did not fit enterprises with large and complex requirements.Thus came Virtualization to the rescue.

With Virtualization application and infrastructure were independant allowing servers to be easily shared by many applications to run virtually anywhere.
Virtualizing an application is packaging the application with everything it needs to run namely databases, middleware and operating systems.

This self contained unit of virtualised application can run pretty much anywhere.

In a turbulent economy cloud computing is more attractive.Why pay for more computing capacity than you need ? Only pay for what you use.

Its all in the Cloud

When I press the "Send" button to drop to say hello to a friend, I don't care how the message went.They would just go in from one side and land up in my friend's inbox.The cloud hid it from us, so we don't need to think about routing or the networks.We had a cloud around the packets.

The next generation of computing is moving towards something that we have based our understanding of the internet on.We usually talk about the internet as the network of networks.Today, everything we think of as a computer today is really just a device that connects to a big computer that we are all collectively building.

So what is cloud computing..?

There is a way wikipedia puts it,

" Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.The users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the "cloud" that supports them."

Lets put it in a way we understand,

Think of it as a metered cab at your disposal whenever you wanted.You only pay by the distance you travel.You don't pay for maintenance, tolls or costs associated with the cab.You pay based on where you want to go that day, you can vary the length of the trips and not worry about the cost.

Another instance,

50 years ago, companies in universities ran their own power plants.People thought that electricity was mission critical, so you can't allow anyone else to manage it.Today we would not dream about managing our own electricity plants.

Consumer technology is evolving at a very rapid pace.One of the hardest challenge that they face is an explosion in the volume of information.While the number of emails and documents were growing at an exponential pace, technology was not keeping up.

The other challenge is the need for collaboration, most the products that were developed aimed at personal productivity while most the work needs to be done through nonuniform contribution of different members of a team.

The third challenge is on the IT side. There are solutions to most of these problems however, they are complex and expensive to manage, making it a nightmare for IT folks.In a typical environment, they would have to manage the OS and the productivity software, the Directory Server, Email Server,Storage Server,Tape Backup, Content Repositories, Security Server, Mobile devices and Databases.

This huge investment, takes up most of our time as we spend it in patching, fixing and making sure that it never goes down.So this meant that the money was not spent effectively by the institution for their core services instead a lot of time and money was spent on various contextual services.

Cloud Computing is about taking the complex environment that is being managed by you and enabling it to be managed by an outside provider like Google, Zoho,Amazon or Yahoo.

So that's about cloud computing. In the next post we'd see the how cloud computing is the convergence of three major trends.