Cloud Computing

Managing Information Assignment

Cloud Computing

MBA London School of Business

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Emerging technologies and the impact on organizationCloud Computing Introduction

Technology has changed the way the business is conducted. Probably more than anything we ve
seen in IT since the invention of timesharing or the introduction of the PC, cloud computing represents a paradigm shift in the delivery architecture of information services. Cloud computing to put it simply means internet computing. The internet is commonly visualized as clouds hence the term cloud computing . With Cloud Computing users can access database resources via the Internet from

anywhere, for as long as they need, without worrying about any maintenance or management of actual resources. Besides, databases in cloud are very dynamic and scalable. Cloud computing is unlike grid computing, utility computing, or autonomic computing. Infact it is a very independent platform in terms of computing.

Definition
Cloud computing refers to applications and services offered over the Internet. These services are offered from data centers all over the world, which collectively are referred to as the "cloud." This metaphor represents the intangible, yet universal nature of the Internet. The idea of the "cloud" simplifies the many network connections and computer systems involved in online services. In fact, many network diagrams use the image of a cloud to represent the Internet. This symbolizes the Internet's broad reach, while simplifying its complexity. Any user with an Internet connection can access the cloud and the services it provides. Since these services are often connected, users can share information between multiple systems and with other users. Examples of cloud computing include online backup services, social networking services, and personal data services such as Apple's MobileMe. Cloud computing also includes online applications, such as those offered through Microsoft Online Services. Hardware services, such as redundant servers, mirrored websites, and Internet-based clusters are also examples of cloud computing. Cloud computing is a practical approach to experience direct cost benefits and it has the potential to transform a data center from a capital-intensive set up to a variable priced environment. The idea of cloud computing is based on a very fundamental principal of reusability of IT capabilities'. The difference that cloud computing brings compared to traditional concepts of grid computing, distributed computing, utility computing, or autonomic computing is to broaden horizons across organizational boundaries.

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Forrester defines cloud computing as: A pool of abstracted, highly scalable, and managed compute infrastructure capable of hosting end-customer applications and billed by consumption.

Conceptual view of cloud computing Cloud Computing Models Cloud Providers offer services that can be grouped into three categories. 1. Software as a Service (SaaS): In this model, a complete application is offered to the customer, as a service on demand. A single instance of the service runs on the cloud & multiple end users are serviced. On the customers side, there is no need for upfront investment in servers or software licenses, while for the provider, the costs are lowered, since only a single application needs to be hosted & maintained. Today SaaS is offered by companies such as Google, Salesforce, Microsoft, Zoho, etc. 2. Platform as a Service (Paas): Here, a layer of software, or development environment is encapsulated & offered as a service, upon which other higher levels of service can be built. The customer has the freedom to build his own applications, which run on the provider s infrastructure. To meet manageability and scalability requirements of the applications, PaaS providers offer a predefined combination of OS and application servers, such as LAMP platform (Linux, Apache, MySql and PHP), restricted J2EE, Ruby etc. Google s App Engine, Force.com, etc are some of the popular PaaS examples.

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3. Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas): IaaS provides basic storage and computing capabilities as standardized services over the network. Servers, storage systems, networking equipment, data centre space etc. are pooled and made available to handle workloads. The customer would typically deploy his own software on the infrastructure. Some common examples are Amazon, GoGrid, 3 Tera, etc.

Cloud Models Understanding Public and Private Clouds Enterprises can choose to deploy applications on Public, Private or Hybrid clouds. Cloud Integrators can play a vital part in determining the right cloud path for each organization. Public Cloud Public clouds are owned and operated by third parties; they deliver superior economies of scale to customers, as the infrastructure costs are spread among a mix of users, giving each individual client an attractive low-cost, Pay-as-you-go model. All customers share the same infrastructure pool with limited configuration, security protections, and availability variances. These are managed and supported by the cloud provider. One of the advantages of a Public cloud is that they may be larger than an enterprises cloud, thus providing the ability to scale seamlessly, on demand. Private Cloud Private clouds are built exclusively for a single enterprise. They aim to address concerns on data security and offer greater control, which is typically lacking in a public cloud. There are two variations to a private cloud: - On-premise Private Cloud: On-premise private clouds, also known as internal clouds are hosted within one s own data center. This model provides a more standardized process and protection, but is limited in aspects of size and scalability. IT departments would also need to incur the capital and operational costs for the physical resources. This is best suited for applications which require complete control and configurability of the infrastructure and security.

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- Externally hosted Private Cloud: This type of private cloud is hosted externally with a cloud provider, where the provider facilitates an exclusive cloud environment with full guarantee of privacy. This is best suited for enterprises that don t prefer a public cloud due to sharing of physical resources. Hybrid Cloud Hybrid Clouds combine both public and private cloud models. With a Hybrid Cloud, service providers can utilize 3rd party Cloud Providers in a full or partial manner thus increasing the flexibility of computing. The Hybrid cloud environment is capable of providing on-demand, externally provisioned scale. The ability to augment a private cloud with the resources of a public cloud can be used to manage any unexpected surges in workload.

Top Ten Enterprises in the Cloud

1. The NY Times Amazon EC2 2. Nasdaq Amazon S3 3. Major League Baseball Joyent 4. ESPN Rightscale using Amazon EC2 5. Hasbro Amazon EC2 6. British Telecom 3Tera 7. Taylor Woodrow Google Apps 8. CSS Amazon EC2 9. Activision Amazon EC2 10. Business Objects (A SAP Company) Rightscale using Amazon EC2

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Advantages of adopting Cloud

Large-scale multitenancy achieves significant economic advantage. Sharing the resources and purchasing power of very large-scale multitenant data centers provides an economic advantage. As an example, a major engineering services companys current internal cost to provide a gigabyte of managed storage is $3.75 per month, while Amazon charges 10 to 15 cents per month. Initially, ISP charges at the company were $3,500 per megabyte per month. After examining the cost structure of companies such as YouTube, the engineering services company assumed that YouTubes costs were in the teens. Taking advantage of network peering arrangements and consolidating the companys interfaces to a place close to the ISPs POP (point-of-presence) have brought costs down to YouTube levels. Broad use of virtualization has also significantly reduced the companys data-center CapEx. Prior to virtualization, server utilization was between 2 and 3 percent and total data-center floor space was around 35,000 square feet. With virtualization in widespread use, server utilization is up to 80 percent and server consolidation has shrunk the square footage of the data center to 1,000 square feet. As more cloud service vendors become available, computing and storage will become a true commodity with fine-grained pricing models, complete with arbitrage opportunities, similar to other commodities such as natural gas and electric power. Under a cloud model, pricing is based on direct storage use and/or the number of CPU cycles expended. It frees service owners from coarser-grained pricing models based on the commitment of whole servers or storage units. Transforming high fixed-capital costs to low variable expenses. Setting up an internal cloud within a company provides an efficient service platform while placing a limit on internal capital expenditures for IT infrastructure. An external cloud service provider can supply overflow service capacity when demand increases beyond internal capacity. Previously, companies had to operate servers for projects even though they might never be invokedsuch as servicing warranties. A cost of $800 to $1,000 per month is not unreasonable to have a server idle on the data-center floor. By moving these projects to an external IaaS vendor, those functions can be placed in the cloud and the service run only when required, at pennies per CPU hour. In this way, companies can transform what was a high fixed cost into a very low variable one. Flexibility. For large enterprises, the ease of deploying a full service set without having to set up base infrastructure to support it can be even more attractive than cost savings. Bechtel must set up new engineering centers with very little notice worldwide. Using internal cloud IT resources, Bechtel can now set up these centers to be fully functional within 30 days. Smoother scalability path. For application architectures that easily scale with added hardware and infrastructure resources, cloud computing allows for many single services to scale over a wide demand range. Animotos service started with 50 instances on Amazon. Because of its popularity, it was able to meet soaring demand and scale to 3,500 instances within three days.

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It is not a given, however, that all application architectures scale that easily. Databases are a good example of hard-to-scale applicationshence, the widespread use of programs such as Amazons SimpleDB. Self-service IT infrastructure. Cloud-computing service models are often self-service, even in internal models. Previously, you had to partner with IT to develop your application, provide an execution platform, and run it. Now, much like Amazon, IT departments define use policies for automated platform and infrastructure services with line-of-business-owners developing applications on their own to meet those requirements. Severely reduced disaster recovery cost. Most SMBs (small- to medium-size businesses) make no investment in DR (disaster recovery). By enabling VMs (virtual machines) to be sent to the cloud for access only when needed, virtualization becomes a cost-effective DR mechanism. Typical DR costs are 2N (twice the cost of the infrastructure). With a cloud-based model, true DR is available for 1.05N, a significant savings. Additionally, because external cloud service providers replicate their data, even the loss of one or two data centers will not result in lost data. Common application platform enables third parties to add value. While telcos are moving to cloud platforms for cost effectiveness, they also see opportunities resulting from a common application platform. By allowing third parties to use their platforms, telcos can deploy services that either extend the telcos services or operate independently. Increased automation. Amazon sees automation as a significant benefit of a cloud services model. Moving into the cloud requires a much higher level of automation because moving offpremises eliminates on-call system administrators. Release from ABI and operating-system dependencies and restrictions. Amazon also sees cloud computing as a way of releasing data centers from the need to support the ABI (application binary interface) and operating-system requirements of key applications. With EC2, Amazon provides five popular VMs to choose from: three flavors of Linux, OpenSolaris, and Windows Server. Its only concern is effectively running the VMs; it does not have to be involved with the VMs internal operations. MapReduce enables new services. Although not the most cost-efficient way of providing datawarehouse functionality, MapReduces use of a large parallel-processing resource has enabled a number of companies to provide cloud-based data-warehousing services. This frees customers from having to invest in large specialty hardware purchases for small service requirements. MapReduce is expected to enable additional service types that were once limited to dedicated hardware. Use Cases
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An international financial exchange paid for the development of a large service. It hosted data in the cloud and ran the application on the clients desktop. All operations were on a pay-as-you-go basis. This is an example of a very low initial investment required to make a commercial service operational.

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Shazam is a start-up company whose service executes on the Apple iPod. It samples songs being played on the radio, matches the songs to a library in the cloud, and returns a link to purchase that song on the iPod. It is an example of a smart device coupled with cloud-based computation and storage. Animoto, hosted on Amazon, was able to track demand of its service and scale up from 50 instances to 3,500 instances over a three-day period. A national newspaper wanted to place scanned images covering a 60-year period online. After being repeatedly turned down by the CIO for the use of six servers, the newspaper moved four terabytes into S3, ran all the software over a weekend on EC2 for $25, and launched its product. A major international auto-race organizer supports special race Web sites that provide live streaming video and realtime technical information. Previously, it would retain an ISP, acquire massive server power, and hire 500 engineers to baby-sit the servers at the ISP to institute server failover manually. When it moved to EC2, the savings in server rental were not that big, but it did realize orders of magnitude in personnel cost savings. Mogulus streams 120,000 live TV channels over the Internet and owns no hardware except for the laptops it uses. It did all of the election coverage for most of the large media sites. Its CEO states that he could not be in business without IaaS.

Distance Implications between Computation and Data How you deal with the distance between computation and data depends heavily on application requirements. If you need to minimize expensive bandwidth, then you should find a way to keep the two in proximity. In cases where bandwidth is expensive and the distances cannot be shortened, it may make sense to download an extract of the data to work on it locally. Longer term, it would be best if developers could write the application in such a way that it would dynamically adjust its data-access mechanisms in response to the operational context (bandwidth cost, bandwidth latency, security, legal data location requirements, etc.). Data Security A common concern about using an external cloud service provider is that it will make data less secure. Because of the wide quality range of corporate IT security, trusting information assets to a recognized cloud service provider could very easily increase the security of those assets. Given that many corporate data centers struggle to fund, architect, and staff a complete security architecture, and that cloud service providers provide IT infrastructure as their primary business and competence, clouds could possibly increase security for the majority of their users. Moreover, 75 to 80 percent of intellectual property breaches are a result of attacks made inside the company, which would not impact a decision to use clouds one way or the other.

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Disadvantages of Cloud Computing

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Requires a constant Internet connection. Cloud computing is impossible if you can't connect to the Internet. Since you use the Internet to connect to both your applications and documents, if you don't have an Internet connection you can't access anything, even your own documents. A dead Internet connection means no work, periodand, in areas where Internet connections are few or inherently unreliable, this could be a deal-breaker. When you're offline, cloud computing simply doesn't work. Doesn't work well with low-speed connections. Similarly, a low-speed Internet connection, such as that found with dial-up services, makes cloud computing painful at best and often impossible. Web-based apps require a lot of bandwidth to download, as do large documents. If you're laboring with a low-speed dial-up connection, it might take seemingly forever just to change from page to page in a document, let alone to launch a feature-rich cloud service. In other words, cloud computing isn't for the broadbandimpaired. Can be slow. Even on a fast connection, web-based applications can sometimes be slower than accessing a similar software program on your desktop PC. Everything about the program, from the interface to the current document, has to be sent back and forth from your computer to the computers in the cloud. If the cloud servers happen to be backed up at that moment, or if the Internet is having a slow day, you won't get the instantaneous access you might expect from desktop apps. Features might be limited. This situation is bound to change, but today many web-based applications simply aren't as full-featured as their desktop-based brethren. For example, you can do a lot more with Microsoft PowerPoint than with Google Presentation's webbased offering. The basics are similar, but the cloud application lacks many of PowerPoint's advanced features. If you're a power user, you might not want to leap into cloud computing just yet. Stored data might not be secure. With cloud computing, all your data is stored on the cloud. How secure is the cloud? Can unauthorized users gain access to your confidential data? Cloud computing companies say that data is secure, but it's too early in the game to be completely sure of that. Only time will tell if your data is secure in the cloud. Stored data can be lost. Theoretically, data stored in the cloud is unusually safe, replicated across multiple machines. But on the off chance that your data goes missing, you have no physical or local backup. (Unless you methodically download all your cloud documents to your own desktopwhich few users do.) Put simply, relying on the cloud puts you at risk if the cloud lets you down.

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Conclusion
Cloud computing is the fastest growing part of IT. It provides tremendous benefits to the customers of all sizes. Cloud computing services are easy to acquire. With its expanding market, cloud computing provides key opportunities for application and infrastructure vendors. Cloud computing holds a lot of promise and it is likely to be a major influence on hosting and application development. The only question to be asked is will the incumbent issues be satisfactory resolved as this new technology matures?

References
Books 1) Barnatt, C A brief guide to cloud computing 2) Rhotten, J Cloud computing explained

Internet 1) How cloud computing works http://computer.howstuffworks.com/cloud-computing.htm 2) Misra, S. C., & Mondal, A. Identification of a companys suitability for the adoption of cloud computing and modelling its corresponding Return on Investment. Mathematical and Computer Modelling, In Press, Corrected Proof. 3) Smarter Tools http://blogs.smartertools.com/2008/11/20/cloud-computing-challenges-benefits-and-thefuture/ 4) Chappell, D An enterprise oriented view http://www.davidchappell.com/CloudPlatforms--Chappell.pdf 5) IBM cloud computing http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/cloud_computing/ideas/ 6) Thought leaders in cloud computing http://www.sramanamitra.com/2010/07/27/thought-leaders-in-cloud-computingoverview/ 7) Plummer, D Experts define cloud computing http://blogs.gartner.com/daryl_plummer/2009/01/27/experts-define-cloud-computingcan-we-get-a-little-definition-in-our-definitions/

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