As we step into the new year of 2010, I want to discuss the top 10 myths of Cloud Computing. Quite a few experts tried to debunk the myths earlier. My attempt is based on what I have seen or heard in my community. The concepts that I am bringing up here cut across IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. If you disagree with any of the points, you are welcome to start a discussion.
10. Only the CIO is concerned about Cloud
While the CIO is the decision maker and may take the final call on investing in the Cloud, there are a few other stakeholders who will get impacted by this move. The IT department, Business managers and also the end users should be proactively engaged in the discussions to understand the implications of partially or completely moving to the Cloud. It is certainly not a silent backend version upgrade or hardware replacement. With the right level of planning, Cloud transition can be made transparent to end users and knowledge workers of the organization. Bottom line – Every key stakeholder of the organization should have the basic understanding of Cloud Computing and what it means to their organization.
9. Cloud bypasses software licensing
This is a debatable point. If you choose to move to a PaaS offering like Microsoft Windows Azure Platform or Google App Engine, you might be able to save on some licensing cost that you would otherwise spend. But if you move to an IaaS offering like AWS or GoGrid, you are still responsible and accountable to software licenses. Though the hardware and servers do not run within your organization, you are pretty much accountable for the software licensing on the Cloud. So moving to a Virtual Physical Server or a Cloud Server will not short-circuit the path of software licensing. The subscription fee that you pay to the Cloud infrastructure vendor covers some of the core licensing requirements like OS and DB. Talk to your commercial software vendor for their special licensing offers for the Cloud.
8. Cloud is open
I have heard this from few entrepreneurs. They think that moving to Cloud will automatically make their apps more open. Unfortunately, Cloud is not immune to vendor lock-in or platform lock-in. For example, once you decide to consume the storage from a service provider, your app will be tightly coupled with the APIs and the dynamics of the storage service. It is complex enough to move your data from one service offering to other similar service offering. Finalizing your Cloud vendor is as crucial as deciding on the platform. Once you sign-up with a vendor, you will not have any option but to start consuming the supplementary services like auto load balancing, CDN, extended security and media streaming etc. There is a huge opportunity for the ISVs to build a “middle ware” for emulating Cloud neutrality.
7. Everything on the web is Cloud
This is a classic myth. Not everything on the WWW is Cloud. A service has to support 4 tenets to be qualified as Cloud. They are 1) Elasticity, 2) Pay-By-Use, 3) Self-Service and, 4) Programmability. Google Apps qualifies to be a Cloud Service (SaaS) because it supports most of the above tenets. But a simple web app or a web service just doesn’t qualify to be a Cloud service.
6. Cloud will instantly make my app secure
While it is true that the Cloud provider will harden the core infrastructure and may not be as vulnerable as plain vanilla hosting provider, you still need to implement security best practices for your application. Make sure that you are covered from SQL Injection attacks and the likes. Maintain good web application security standards. Vendors like Amazon also provide multifactor authentication and Virtual Private Cloud bringing in additional level of security layers.
5. PaaS enables copy & paste of my application to Cloud
Both Google App Engine and Microsoft Windows Azure platform have some limitations. Thanks to Windows Azure Native Execution Mode, you can run applications in Full Trust Mode. But Google App Engine imposes quite a few restrictions that will force you to rethink of your design and architecture. File I/O, sockets and multithreading will have a lot of issues. On Azure, you got to partition your app for the Web Role and Worker Role. Communication between Web Role and Worker Role needs additional design considerations. Data access demands redesign. You got to think on how to leverage flexible entities, blobs and the standard relational databases on the Cloud.
4. Cloud has a steep learning curve
I met many developers who argue that Cloud is the successor to .NET, Java and LAMP platforms. Some of the training organizations in India started to offer Cloud Computing courses to undergraduate students. While Cloud is certainly the platform of the platforms, it is not a replacement or a successor to existing platforms. It is more of a change in thinking than learning something from the scratch. Cloud has deep roots in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
3. Everything should be on Cloud
I have seen many developers wanting to move their blog to Cloud. Remember that only when you want a high degree of special abilities like reliability, scalability and availability, you should think of Cloud. Moving non mission-critical web application to Cloud doesn’t offer any advantages. Only when you think your application is demanding heavy resources and when you need virtually unlimited computing power and storage, think of Cloud. Moving a static site or a blog to Cloud just doesn’t make sense.
2. Cloud is cheap
Cloud is not cheap. The biggest advantage of moving to Cloud is avoiding an upfront investment on infrastructure. But just like you have to pay more when you opt for an Equated Monthly Installment (EMI) instead of a one-time payment, you end up paying more than owning or co-location of your servers. Here is a cost analysis (dated but still applicable) of own servers, co-location and Amazon EC2.
1. Cloud = Web Hosting
This is undoubtedly the number one myth about Cloud Computing. At least one in every three developers / entrepreneurs that I met mentioned this. They think hosting a web site or exposing a XML Web Service is Cloud Computing. I discussed this in-depth in my article, The Tenets of the Cloud. Refer to this diagram for a quick reference.
Hope you found my attempt useful. I will be covering the Cloud Computing scenarios for emerging markets in my future posts.
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.
