Cloud Foundations

Cloud foundations

What you need to know about on-demand computing

What is the cloud?

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/04_01/tornadoDM3030a_800x533.jpg

Utility computing

Pay as you go

Abstraction of platform from infrastructure

Dynamic scaling without physical intervention

Subscriber sandboxing

Lots of definitions

Managed hosting

Virtualization

Grid computing

Major types of cloud http://www.eo.ucar.edu/webweather/cloud3.html

Component vs. service Web App DB DB App App Storage services VM VM VM VM VM VM App cluster Add instances to grow Rewrite for scalability Storage services Code Storage Layout Auth Cloud APIs Other services

Centralized vs. distributed Amazon AT&T

Agnostic vs. partisan

Ning wants to be a social network

Webex wants to collaborate

Salesforce wants to be a CRM

Quickbase wants to be SMB

Open vs. closed

Portability

Open source

Clouds make great sense

Vastly superior economics

Better practices for dynamic workloads

Expertise in dynamic capacity management

Consumption-based cost tracking

James Staten, Forrester, March 2008

There’s money to be had

AWS uses more bandwidth than Amazon.com

Hosted apps were a $3.95B market in 2007

IDC, quoted by Thomas Weisel partners, April 2008

A $100B opportunity

Merrill Lynch, May 2008

But enterprises lag

Pay-as-you-go looks great to cash-poor startups Unknown/variable Known/fixed Variable

So what’s stopping the enterprise?

Performance & availability

Privacy and security

Questions over storage

Where are you keeping all this?

Third-party access

Who else is reading it?

Some truth, some fiction

Legislation and compliance

What ethical responsibilities do cloud operators have?

Wiretapping?

Patriot Act?

Privacy and geographic boundaries?

Can a company properly track all activity if it happens in a cloud?

Do you really want to give users unlimited access? http://debroffdebrief.clubmom.com/debroff_debrief/2007/04/dont_forget_to_.html

Lock-in Formal Proprietary APIs and languages Informal I can’t build it myself even if I want to

Can I keep my toys?

Either pay the legacy tax

Or rewrite the apps

Rewriting for a services cloud

Cost of development, testing

Service interruption

Migration

Expected lifespan of the app

http://flickr.com/photos/7989285@N07/1794264347/

Management issues

The “pull the plug” test

Management not part of many cloud offerings

Some exceptions, some investments by clouds

Licensing, accounting, audit remain challenges

http://flickr.com/photos/vespa_gt/522067424/

Virtual private clouds

Best of both worlds?

Policy-based deployment of VMs

Capacity of private systems

Sensitivity of data

Required performance & availability of the app

Expected lifespan of the VM

Call this “cloudbursting”

But still...

“[There are] 60,000 different customers across the various Amazon Web Services, and most of them are not the startups that are normally associated with on-demand computing.

Rather the biggest customers in both number and amount of computing resources consumed are divisions of banks, pharmaceuticals companies and other large corporations who try AWS once for a temporary project, and then get hooked.”

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/21/who-are-the-biggest-users-of-amazon-web-services-its-not-startups/

What to watch

Hosting companies that make the jump

Stack-specific clouds

Who’s got network effects? feed.API (facebook) > feed.api (friendster)

Virtual appliances Cisco Nortel F5 Juniper Stomp IPChains Vyatta Checkpoint Hardware Software

Tools to wrangle virtual machines

Testing sandboxes

Application delivery networks

Some conclusions