The expectations around Cloud Computing are very high. It is one of the most discussed terminologies among CIOs, developers and IT managers. While there is certainly more hype around it than what it really is, Cloud Computing is definitely promising. Gartner calls the year 2010 as the year of Cloud Computing. No doubt! Cloud Computing will redefine the IT management and data center operations. This article attempts to look at the Cloud through the eyes of an Entrepreneur, developer, IT manager and the consumer.
Pay-By-Use – By leveraging Cloud Computing, customers will only pay for the resources that they use. There is no upfront commitment in the form of capital expenditure.
Elasticity – Cloud Computing enables applications to scale up or scale down on demand. This dynamic capability is referred as Elasticity.
Self-Service – Most of the Cloud Computing offerings have self-service portals and dashboards. Provisioning and configuring the Cloud services is easy and doesn’t require complex technical skill set.
Programmability – Cloud Computing empowers the developers by offering programmable infrastructure. Most of the Cloud Computing environments have an API or scripting interface to programmatically manage the service offering.
Entrepreneur – The most important factor that any entrepreneur considers is the IT budget. The challenge is to optimize the budget between human resources and IT infrastructure. As a startup entrepreneur, you may have an innovative idea and one of the best business models. But determining the right no. of servers to go live is not an easy task. You face the risk of over investing or under investing in the infrastructure. This is where Cloud offers tremendous value. Cloud is elastic by nature. Technically, you can start with one server and potentially scale to hundreds of servers on demand. One of the key tenets of the Cloud is pay-by-use. Through this, businesses can move their infrastructure to the Cloud and only pay for what they use. Based on the business demand, they can decide to scale out by ‘hiring’ more servers on demand and scale down when done. This will turn the CAPEX on IT infrastructure into OPEX. Budding entrepreneurs can benefit from this ‘elastic’ nature of Cloud by paying for what they really use. So, if you are an entrepreneur, you should explore the pay-by-use model that some of the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers like Amazon and GoGrid offer. The other important attribute of the Cloud is Self-Service. To manage the Cloud infrastructure, you need not hire full time IT administrators. Most of the Cloud services have easy to manage self-service portals. This is true for Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings like Microsoft Business Productivity Suite offering Cloud based messaging and collaboration services. Bottom line – Cloud will help entrepreneurs save the upfront cost of infrastructure.
Developers – Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering targets the developers. The most popular developer platforms are .NET and Java. In an ideal world, developers never worry about the provisioning and the infrastructure plumbing tasks. PaaS brings the Cloud close to developers by freeing them from worrying about the provisioning and the IT management chores. PaaS promises the best of the abilities to the developers which include Scalability, Reliability, Availability and Security. Through this developers will design, develop, build, debug and test their applications on inexpensive local machines that run the stack of their choice. Once they are confident, they will move their code to run on the world’s best datacenters running some of the proven services. Microsoft Windows Azure platform and Google App Engine are the popular PaaS offerings. Both offer tools and SDK to enable developers to emulate the Cloud environment locally for development. By deploying onto Microsoft Windows Azure platform, developers run their applications on the same infrastructure that powers Bing, Windows Live and other web services from Microsoft.
Public Cloud – Public Cloud is implemented by vendors who invested in powerful datacenters. Public Cloud is shared by multiple customers where each customer pays for the resources that he consumed.
Private Cloud – When the Cloud Computing environment runs within an organization behind the firewall it is called as a Private Cloud. Private Cloud offers all the abilities of the Cloud but only within the organizational boundaries.
IT Manager – Cloud is available to organizations in one of the two forms – Private Cloud or Public Cloud. Private Cloud brings the benefit of Cloud Computing to the enterprise by running within the organizational boundaries. Public Cloud is managed and run by vendors who offer the services on subscription. IT Managers will typically start by setting up a Private Cloud that acts as a test bed. After the pilot, they deploy the Private Cloud that can be leveraged by multiple internal teams. Private Clouds will drastically reduce the time and the management overhead involved in provisioning the new servers. IT Managers can then optimize the administrator’s time effectively. The task of setting up new servers that may typically runs into few weeks to provision will be reduced to few hours on a Private Cloud. Individual teams will be empowered to configure and take control of their infrastructure needs. Private Cloud can be based on Microsoft Windows Hyper-V or VMware. Based on the compliance and the regulations, IT Manages can move data and heavy computing tasks to the Public Cloud.
Consumers – With ubiquitous access to Internet, most of the traditional tasks of knowledge workers and consumers are moving to the Cloud. Software as a Service (SaaS) is a form of a Cloud that the end-users will experience. With the traditional approach, consumers will have to buy the software and licenses that may result in huge capital expenditure. They end up paying for features and products that they may not use very often. When the same software is offered as a service on the Cloud, consumers will have the option for subscribing to features/products that they care about. This results in better Return on Investment (RoI). Salesforce.com has been in the CRM business since 2001. They were the first to offer traditional CRM on subscription. Recently it is Zoho and Google Docs that became popular as the consumer SaaS offerings. Going forward, most of the office suits and Line of Business (LoB) applications will be offered as SaaS. Microsoft’s Office 2010 has the free Office Web Applications. Other popular services from Microsoft like Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, Live Meeting are offered on subscription along with other Microsoft services like Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).
In summary, there is something for everyone on the Cloud. IT Managers are aligned with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) while developers are aligned with the Platform as a Service (PaaS) and finally consumers will subscribe to the Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings.
As a Cloud Computing Strategist, Janakiram MSV helps businesses understand and adopt the Cloud Computing paradigm. His core strength is designing and architecting solutions for the Cloud. Janakiram focuses on industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings including Microsoft Windows Azure.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey!!good explanation..
Crisp explanation!
Thanks Meera!
Well explained, crystal clear. Also I think, ideally, & unlike traditional apps where customization is the key; a true SaaS should meet any requirement by simple configuration.
Jani, What do you think? Is it always true?
Absolutely! Self Service is the key to the adoption of Cloud Computing and SaaS in particular.
Nice blog entry of different perspectives that people can have on cloud computing!
Thanks Dr. Petri!