Cloud computing

Overheard - Cloud cartography

Cloud computing is about the commoditization of virtualization. That’s a mouthful, but that’s essentially what cloud computing is. George Reese, as quoted in Learning to let go: A cloud security primer with George Reese

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is cloud cartography.

Cloud economics - budgeting for the cloud

There are two key areas in which companies should consider the economics of cloud computing: (1) how much an organization can save if it consumes cloud computing as an outsourced utility computing service and (2) how much it might save if cloud computing principles successfully reformulate data center strategies. Tom Nolle, Gaining cost savings from the cloud

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is cloud computing.  In a memo  released last week, the Feds propose cloud computing and  telecommuting as ways to make the federal government leaner.

Cloud-computing and “work-at-a-distance” represent major new Government-wide initiatives, supported by the CIO Council under the auspices of the Federal CIO (OMB’s E-Government Administrator), and funded through the General Services Administration (GSA) as the service-provider.

It’s in this section called “IMPROVING INNOVATION, EFFICIENCy AND EFFECTIVENESS IN FEDERAL IT.”

Terabyte - two terabytes in the news

The National Archives lost a terabyte disk drive filled with sensitive data from the Clinton administration, including Social Security numbers and Secret Service procedures.  Had this data been on a self-encrypting drive, we would not have heard of its loss. Pete Steege, The National Archives lose a terabyte drive filled with sensitive data

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is terabyte. A terabyte (one trillion bytes) is in the news today for two reasons — a terabyte of data of data from the Clinton administration is missing from the National Archives and Amazon has announced a new cloud service called Import/Export for moving terabytes of data to the cloud.

The interesting thing about missing data from the Clinton administration is that it was on a 2-terabyte hard drive that was left sitting on a shelf for a couple of months. And guess what? The data on it was not encrypted. What the heck???

The Amazon announcement is another WTH.  The Import/Export service is being promoted as a way to move large datasets to and from the cloud (meaning Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).)

A terabyte is a lot of data and trying to push it up to Amazon over the Internet takes a lot of bandwidth.  With Amazon Import/Export, you can move the data by off-loading it to a portable storage device and then shipping the device to Amazon.  Amazon has a handy-dandy calculator for estimating the cost of service.  They will charge you $80 for moving the data from the portable device to the storage you’ve purchased at Amazon (along with a $2.49 per data-loading-hour surcharge) and then they’ll ship the device back to you.  It might sound pricey until you consider that uploading a terabyte of data over the Internet with your T1 line is likely to take 82 days.

And oh yeah,  you may want to take a lesson from the National Archives and encrypt that data before you ship it out.

Overheard - End of the IT department

In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least in its familiar form. It will have little left to do once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centers and into the cloud. Nicholas Carr, Why IT Will Change

The corporate IT department has had a dual nature until now. One really important function has been the kind of technical expertise that keeps the computing machines running.

Over the next five or 10 years, the technical aspect of the IT department will become less important. It will slowly evaporate as more of those experts go outside onto the grid. But the information management and information strategy elements will become, if anything, more important. The ways companies take advantage of digitized information will become more important, not less.

The big question in the long run is, do those types of skills—information management and thinking—remain in a separate IT department or do they naturally flow into business units and other traditional parts of the business? My guess is that over time, they’ll begin to flow into the business itself and that will be accelerated as individual workers and business units get more control over the way they are able to organize and manipulate their own information. I would be surprised if maybe 20 years from now there are still IT departments in corporations.That doesn’t mean that the skills in those departments are going away. The more technical skills will probably move out into the supplier community and the strategic thinking, or tactical thinking about information, will flow out into the business itself.

Overheard - No LAMP in the cloud?

This generation of web services got their start from LAMP - a stack of simple, yet powerful technologies that to this day is behind a lot of popular web sites. The beauty of LAMP is in its simplicity; it makes it very easy to get a prototype out the door. The problem with LAMP is in its scalability. Alex Iskold, Reaching for the Sky Through The Compute Clouds

The first scalability issue is fairly minor - threads and socket connections of the Apache web server. When load increases and configuration is not tuned properly you might run into problems. But the second problem with LAMP is far more significant: the MySQL relational database is the ultimate bottleneck of the system.

Lately I’ve been reading about the future of the LAMP stack, which I always thought of as the poster child for Web 2.0. Alex got me wondering about the future of LAMP now that everything is cloud-colored. Will MySQL be the bottleneck?  But then I read this article about Sun Microsystems throwing “more chips into its “billion-dollar bet on the LAMP stack” with the recent launch of its MySQL Enterprise 2008” and now I’m not so sure that LAMP is on its way out.

Overheard - All we are saying…is give clouds a chance

If you can increase your capacity simply by adding another twenty nodes to your infrastructure (such as with standard clustered LAMP deployments) you should try putting a few nodes in a cloud for a month and see if it works for you. Kyle Rankin, Data center panel weighs cloud computing risks, rewards

Overheard - Key to cloud is an old-fashioned SLA

“Cloud computing” is an apt name for a technology that is many things to many people. Although each vendor that enters the space seems to have a different approach to cloud services, all of them face a common challenge: coming up with an achievable service guarantee to reassure hesitant customers. Erika Morphy, Cloud Computing, Part 3: SLA Spirit in the Sky

Take the tech challenge for service level agreement.

Overheard - A hybrid cloud is not a cloudburst

Cloudbursting is an application hosting model which combines existing corporate infrastructure with new, cloud-based infrastructure to create a powerful, highly scalable application hosting environment. Jeff Barr, Cloudbursting - Hybrid Application Hosting

I could have come up with some kind of lifeless and forgettable acronym, but that’s not my style. I proposed cloudbursting in a meeting a month or two ago and everyone seemed to like it.

I really like Jeff Barr and usually agree with his observations, but this time I think he missed the boat…er cloud. The term cloudburst doesn’t really describe a hybrid model at all. And it has a negative connotation. And it’s already been used in the blogosphere to describe what happens when your cloud is unavailable.

Remember Microsoft’s Hailstorm? Not a good name either. Still, I can see why Jeff didn’t want to just slap an ordinary acronym on the concept. Hybrid Application Hosting. HAH?

We need to put on our thinking caps and help him out.

Overheard - Frank Gillett’s cloud computing reality check

Forrester’s Frank Gillett talks with Beet.tv about “cloudwashing.”  He does a nice job breaking down where the future might lie for cloud computing and unlike a lot of other pundits, Frank seems to have his feet on the ground (and not in the clouds).  Don’t miss this one.

Thanks go to Dennis Shiao for recommending this video clip. My takeaway?  I need to keep an eye on three things: software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and virtual infrastructure as a service (usually shortened to just IaaS).

Overheard: Future of clouds remain hazy without standards

It is clear that without standards of one kind or another (de-facto or from a recognised body), there won’t be a market, and without a market, the cloud is unlikely to thrive. The competition isn’t as much between cloud providers, as it is between cloud providers and internal IT organizations. Cloud providers need to keep that firmly in mind. Benjamin Ellis, CloudCamp London 2: On Standards. Special Guest Post

A standard image format might provide a base level of standardization, but there is a risk that the industry then gets caught up in a ‘lowest common denominator’ model that throttles much of the unique innovation that the scale and speed of cloud computing allows. There was a consensus for a pragmatic approach: a layering of APIs, standardizing a layer at a time.

(My apologies to Benjamin Ellis! I had originally credited this quote to James Govenor.)