2. Agenda
• What is cloud computing?
• Evolution of cloud computing
• Cloudspeak
• Sample (AWS)
• Market trends
• Prognosis
• Q&A
3. Disclaimers!
• No agreement on terms used
• Big players and large stakes!
• Quotable quotes
– “The interesting thing about Cloud computing is that we’ve
redfined cloud computing to include everything that we already
do…” – Larry Ellison, quoted in WSJ
– “A lot of people are jumping on the cloud bandwagon, but I have
not heard two people say the same thing about it. There are
multiple definitions out there of the “cloud”” – Andy Isherwood,
quoted in ZDNet
– “It is stupidity. It is a hype marketing campaign. Somebody is
saying that this is inevitable. And whenever you hear somebody
saying it, it is likely to be business campainging to make it true”
– Richard Stallman quoted in Guardian
4. What is cloud computing?
• Ability to create an illusion of infinite computing
resources (CPU, memory, disk)
• On-demand: Scaling of resources programmatically with
small SLA (Elasticity)
• Pay-for-use: Ability to pay for use of resources on a short
term basis as needed (hour/day basis)
Source: “Above the clouds: A Berkeley view of Cloud Computing”
5. Evolution of the cloud
• New developments that have made Cloud
computing a reality
– Availability of cheap commodity hardware based on
x86
– Maturing of Linux as a platform
– Proliferation of cheap Multicore CPUs
– Virtualization
– Home grown recipe interconnects and networking –
Google, Facebook
6. Evolution of the cloud – cont’d
– Rapid growth of internet in 2000’s made internet
companies like Amazon, Google, Flickr to invent and
make a scalable infrastructure like huge databases,
filesystems, provisioning systems etc (Google File
System, BigTable)
– Amazon thought “Why not we let others use our
infrastructure on pay per use basis” and the AWS was
born
– Renting out the spare capacity and make money from
them!
8. Terms defined
• Cloud
– = infrastructure
– Set of servers and software running on them
– Example: Datacenter hardware + software in Ametek
• Public cloud
– When the same cloud is made available in a pay-as-you-go
manner, it is called as public cloud
• SaaS (Software as a Service)
– If the service offered is use of applications on pay-as-you-go-
basis, it is called as SaaS
Cloud computing = Cloud + Services offered by the cloud
9. CloudSpeak - SaaS
• What is it?
– Applications hosted on vendor’s infrastructure and accessed by
customers browsers
• Key characteristics
– Typically single application hosted on a servers
– Customer accesses them through browser
– Supports millions of customers (multi-tenant)
• Benefits to customer:
– No servers
– Pay as you use, scale when you need
• Benefits to vendor:
– Ease of configuration, provisioning
– Easy to scale
– Only one app to maintain
• Examples:
– Salesforce.com, Google docs, Yahoo Zoho office, Our own Replicon
10. CloudSpeak - PaaS
• What is it?
– Hosted development platform that allows building of applications with
preconfigured components
• Key characteristics
– Development environment as the service
– End customer “assembles” an application for his/her needs
– Assembled application runs on vendor’s infrastructure
• Benefits to customer:
– No licensing of software and no servers
– Pay as you use
– “Configurability” – e-g workflow
• Benefits to vendor:
– Ease of configuration, provisioning
– Easy to scale
• Examples:
– Mbed – ARM Microcontroller IDE on cloud
– http://www.salesforce.com/platform/
11. Terms defined - IaaS
• What is it?
– Basic HW, networking, security infrastructure
– Provisioned when you ask for it..
• Key characteristics
– You get a Linux/Windows PC with its own IP address,
preconfigured with memory, disk space
– You can install your software on top of it
– You access it through SSH and SFTP
• Benefits to customer:
– Completely customizable
– It is like putting a Windows/Linux PC and load it custom SW for
use by customers
• Examples:
– http://aws.amazon.com
14. Amazon - IaaS
• Scalable Storage Services (S3)
• Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2)
• And many other services!!
• Allows fine grain control of images, applications and
management; Persistent storage support
• Powerful like a low level assembly language, but should
know how to use it (be comfy with bolts and nuts)
• Platforms supported: LAMP, Microsoft, MySQL
• Plusses: First to offer the services; Good technical
support forums
• Minusses: Bare metal access and for power users; Need
VAR/3rd party solutions to bring features like failover,
load balancing etc
• But advent of “Amazon Marketplace” has made life
easy..
15. Google - PaaS
• Google App Engine (GAE) is the platform
• Provides “preconfigured” environment to run your
applications on Google infrastructure
• Supports Python and Java. No other languages
supported
• Ties in neatly with other Google features –
authentication, google docs, maps and so on
• A free account with 500MB of persistent storage and
enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page
views a month
• Automatic scaling (No need to do programmatically)
• Good development environment and ease of use
16. Microsoft
• Late starter to the game
• Azure is the platform
• Supports both IaaS and PaaS
• You can build applications that run on Microsoft data
centers and provide web services
• Supports multiple platforms
• Seamlessly integrates with Microsoft ecosystem and
environment
17. Sample - Amazon AWS
• First to offer cloud services
• Branded as Amazon Web services, is a collection of
cloud services
• Offers low level access and full programmer flexibility, all
the way from kernel
• Simple Storage Service (S3)
– Offers storage on go, in slices of gigabyte, priced as Gb/month
– Organized in form of “buckets”
• Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offers
– Virtual Machines of 1Ghz x86 variety
– Can be used and paid for 1 hour slots
– Provisioned in 5 minutes
– Provides ssh shell to login and use
18. Amazon AWS – cont’d
• You create an account and start using services
• Bills paid by credit cards
• Apps can interact with AWS through REST/SOAP
protocols
• Lots of other services
– Email
– Map-reduce
– Databases
– Transcoding
– CDN …
20. Third party support
• “AWS Marketplace”
– Third parties provide ready made images for use, charged on
use basis
– Red Hat with its JBoss application server.
– Oracle offers its 11g database, Fusion middleware, and
Enterprise Manager on EC2
– Microsoft followed with Windows Server and SQL Server.
– IBM offers DB2, Informix, WebSphere, and Lotus Web Content
Management as pay-by-the-hour Amazon Machine Images over
SuSE Linux over EC2; Plans Tivoli Service management
capabilities into EC2
– See the list in
https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/ref=mkt_ste_ftr
– You just decide what you want to use and start using without
worries about HW, scalability and lockdown with vendors!
21. Some case studies using AWS!
• In 2007, the New York Times made available its archives in PDF
format from 1851-1922. They accomplished this by employing a
combination of software, programming and Amazon's EC2 service
to process more than 11 million documents in a few hours time. The
total bill for this project? $240
• See sample customers in
https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/#ondemand
23. Drivers for adoption
• Cost and complexity of servers, applications
going up over years => IS cost going up
• For non IT companies, it is difficult to set up data
center and management staff; for SME’s it is
really difficult
• Scalability is difficult
• Upfront licensing costs, server costs
• Cloud model gives them advantage of no upfront
payments, pay as per use model, allows scaling
up/down based on needs and is SME friendly
24. Inhibitors for Adoption
• Security – How do we trust what vendor says?
• Data is shared in server farm with potentially competitors. What is
the level of encryption offered by vendor?
• How is disaster recovery handled?
• Severely dependent on quality of connectivity. What happens if
WAN connection is cutoff?
• Just where is the data? Discomfort with location of servers beyond
geography, legal issues
• Some industries need compliance to laws (HIPPA..)
• No control - Transactions cannot be logged with finer control –
needed for investigative activities
• Tie in with a specific platform – Google- python; Amazon AWS –
LAMP;You will need to convert to that platform. Data in proprietary
formats – Google has data in bigTable format and not in standard
DB format
• What happens if the service has disturbance?
• What happens if the company shuts down??
• NIMBY attitude
25. Current status of adoption
• Consumer market
– Personal cloud storage – very good adoption in
western markets. Players: Mozy, Box.net, Amazon S3
– Integrated with Browser (plugin) and very easy to use.
Many have accounts
– Typical cost: Mozy: $5/month
• Web companies
– Very good adoption
– No need to set up infrastructure; no need to design
for “peak” capacity; Scale as per needs
– Reduces burn rate for startups and makes them a
profitable business
– Examples: Smugmug (Paid photo sharing site),
Redbus.in, Hungama, NDTV, July Systems..
26. Current status of adoption
• Enterprises
– Large enterprises show Inhibition due to security and
“lack of control” feelings
– Large enterprises also have an existing IS and
infrastructure that makes change difficult
– SMEs are moving quickly in adaption
– Adoption less in BFSI and specific geographies due
to legal issues
27. Prognosis..
• Adoption is high in consumer market (Mozy..)
and startups
• Current economic Slowdown will make a strong
case to reduce new capex and move to pay per
use model
• Large corporations and some sectors like BFSI
will move slowly
• Like it or not, cloud will grow stronger, and it will
be a “big boy game” as it involves huge CAPEX
investment for cloud service providers
28. Crystal ball..
• In early days of electricity, everybody had their own
generation stations
• Slowly, concept of centralized generation and distribution
caught up
• By 19th century, everything was centralized and grid was in
place
• Close parallel seen in computing – utility computing and
storage will take primacy in coming years
• But it is dependent on reliable grid to access the infrastructure
– it is existing in western world now, but not in other places
• What do we do if power goes off? We have invertors at home.
Similarly, we will possibly have a smaller data center in
enterprise and most of remaining data in cloud
• Cloud computing will evolve to “mostly centralized” and “some
localized” concept
