Cloud computing: a new paradigm in the IT industry

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

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

What is cloud computing?

Recently, I started giving you home kitchen vs restaurant examples to explain the concept behind ‘cloud computing’. A kitchen in the home is dedicated to the home, the resources, whether they are the vessels or the appliances, or the person who cooks is dedicated to that home. The owner of the house invests in the kitchen and reaps the benefit of having the kitchen for him or her or her family members. It is the owner of the house who has to maintain the kitchen. When one compares home cooking to restaurant cooking, 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 is a restaurant except for the food it offers. In a nutshell, the same is the concept between traditional IT offering and cloud computing.

Like the home kitchen, in the case of the 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 he is a rich person) to prepare food at home. . With the evolution of the IT industry in hardware and software, we are moving towards the ‘restaurant’ model of IT services; you only pay for what is your ultimate goal: ‘processed food’ or ‘services’. Like in a restaurant, where you are only concerned with the quality of the food and the expected service and not much concerned with who the chef is, or the waiter, or the appliances, or even where the kitchen is, is the case with “computing in Cloud”. ‘, the customer is focused on the service offering and not on the hardware, software, raw data, or resources used to provide the service offering or end product.

Organizations are not going to jump into cloud computing, they will evolve and move towards cloud computing infrastructure features over a period of time as they feel confident about the same. When it comes to cloud computing, I think we’re at a similar stage to where we were in the early 1990s when it came to outsourcing IT services. IT services were outsourced so that the organization could concentrate on the ‘core’ business area; cloud computing could well be a step forward.

Now, let’s 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 confidentiality of data are the conditioning factors 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:

Computing, storage and hardware servers are considered under this service model. You would also find free storage offered on the web, this could be referred to as IaaS.

PaaS: Platform – as – a service:

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

If you look at the cloud deployment strategy, it’s typically public, private, and hybrid clouds. I feel like the name itself is pretty meaningful 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 in the traditional model. By traditional model, I mean that one could have a server to serve the database tier or the application tier, which is almost a “silo” based model. But, since cloud computing, it takes 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 scalability and server virtualization features play an important role for better cloud management and implementation.

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

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

Pooling of 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 that the client generally has no control over or knowledge of the exact location of the resources provided.

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

Metered Service: Cloud systems automatically monitor and optimize resource usage by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (for example, storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled and reported, providing 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 best performing servers. Providers 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 still be a few more years before cloud computing matures and it could well redefine the IT outsourcing map.

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

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