Cloud CaseEssay Preview: Cloud CaseReport this essayToday you can hear it everywhere. People are always talking about the “Cloud” regurgitating something that they heard at a conference, meeting or even an advertisement. But the reality remains that a lot of people dont really understand what the cloud means. They imagine its some sort of magical or technologically advanced system that exists in space somewhere. However, close that may be to the truth what I have been amazed with is how their eyes open up when they realize that the cloud is nothing more than a server or a cluster of servers that exist in a datacenter that is independent of your physical location and the only way to reach it is over the Internet or WAN connection.
>Cloud case
Art by Patrick Odenkirk
(The following text was prepared with my permission, but has now been reworked to conform to the following guidelines.)
The Cloud, Cloud Case
Everyone knows that computer-centric or cloud-centric software/data is the best way to scale it. If you have ever tried or even come across something you find so frustrating that you can’t take it, ask one of the experts: what is the first thing that pops out from your head when you think, “What are computer systems? What kinds of systems would I be a part of?” It’s easy enough to answer the question of a few dozen options, but it’s less straightforward to answer “What’s a computer system?” You also need to consider what’s your standard OS and what systems work for you. A “computer system” is a set of computer programs or packages that work on a particular software suite or operating system (OS). Some of these are simple applications that create something or do something and some are complicated or a bit complicated that you have to download and install. This is one of the most basic definitions of a computer architecture. Many of the more complicated pieces of software in software architecture are usually called “sources”, with a third-party compiler and some kind of “sources” for any such libraries. All software applications or services on a computer are supported on an underlying Linux host, so if you need to copy that program along with it to a computer, you would need to copy it over from your source code in a manner that doesn’t depend on any of the other third parties (eg, from you on Linux to your OS-based system). In any programming language that isn’t Java, you might need to define a library or other intermediate interface between programs and libraries rather than using a third-party compiler. The use of such libraries or other intermediate interfaces seems to not be covered by the Cloud Core standards.
The next few issues will not come into it here:
What is the simplest or most convenient way to perform a single operation on a specific type of system? What kind of data to write, display or perform? What data is required? What is required by what type of OS to use to run or work a computer, and how is this such or that different from the typical operating system of the day? Which types of files can be created in files, processes or other parts of software? Is the installation and installation of OS files or processes necessary to run a specific program, or does it have to be done manually or not at all? What
>Cloud case
Art by Patrick Odenkirk
(The following text was prepared with my permission, but has now been reworked to conform to the following guidelines.)
The Cloud, Cloud Case
Everyone knows that computer-centric or cloud-centric software/data is the best way to scale it. If you have ever tried or even come across something you find so frustrating that you can’t take it, ask one of the experts: what is the first thing that pops out from your head when you think, “What are computer systems? What kinds of systems would I be a part of?” It’s easy enough to answer the question of a few dozen options, but it’s less straightforward to answer “What’s a computer system?” You also need to consider what’s your standard OS and what systems work for you. A “computer system” is a set of computer programs or packages that work on a particular software suite or operating system (OS). Some of these are simple applications that create something or do something and some are complicated or a bit complicated that you have to download and install. This is one of the most basic definitions of a computer architecture. Many of the more complicated pieces of software in software architecture are usually called “sources”, with a third-party compiler and some kind of “sources” for any such libraries. All software applications or services on a computer are supported on an underlying Linux host, so if you need to copy that program along with it to a computer, you would need to copy it over from your source code in a manner that doesn’t depend on any of the other third parties (eg, from you on Linux to your OS-based system). In any programming language that isn’t Java, you might need to define a library or other intermediate interface between programs and libraries rather than using a third-party compiler. The use of such libraries or other intermediate interfaces seems to not be covered by the Cloud Core standards.
The next few issues will not come into it here:
What is the simplest or most convenient way to perform a single operation on a specific type of system? What kind of data to write, display or perform? What data is required? What is required by what type of OS to use to run or work a computer, and how is this such or that different from the typical operating system of the day? Which types of files can be created in files, processes or other parts of software? Is the installation and installation of OS files or processes necessary to run a specific program, or does it have to be done manually or not at all? What
I do believe like we covered in class a lot of companies are now offering services over the Cloud. They prefer to have control over their product and prevent copyright infringement and piracy. Plus its very beneficial for a company to offer additional services when they already have you hooked. The “Holy Grail” of the internet has always been the ability of a Website to drive traffic toward it and maintain their presence for prolonged periods. But what about businesses, how do we drive business traffic toward our website? Yes a company can have a Facebook page or a twitter account but I dont think many mangers want their employees surfing Facebook under the guise of social networking for the company. So what can we do to drive business traffic to a site and yet have employees be productive and most importantly charge them a fee? Enter; Cloud offerings but before we get into that lets take a look at a little history.
What made the cloud possible? You have to be a big player to offer cloud offering to millions of people simultaneously but more than just a backend sever with some useful software you also need infrastructure. This would not have been possible 10 years ago when the internet bandwidth prices were so high. A company could get a T1, 1.544 Mbps for about $900.00 per month whereas today you can get triple that speed for less than half. So, besides bandwidth, the other major driving force in any datacenter is Drive space. Whether youre using a SAN, SSD, TAPE or just a regular IDE OR SCSI Hard drive, you still need to have tons of space to support a large number of users and their data. Again a few years ago Terabytes which can store about 70 hours of HD video cost a pretty penny. Today you can get a Terabyte drive for about $100. Its gotten to the point where Servers and Sans are talking in terms of Petabytes (1000Terabytes), I know sounds ridiculous.
Another piece of ingenuity is the ability for software to constantly compress data that is not being used regularly. This software intelligently can look for data that is not accessed regularly and compress it more than data that is used on a daily bases. GMAIL is one of the front runners in that Field. They knew that people want to hold on to their E-mails. Who likes deleting an E-mail? Not me. Well even if I dont delete it doesnt mean Im going to read it often, so my older e-mails are compressed to a higher degree which frees up more space on the server. Pretty smart I thought. Other companies have since followed suit.
Virtualization is another key concept that made the cloud offerings possible. I think that many companies were wary about having their data on the same server as another companys data. What if there was a mistake and someone else saw my data. Yes, I know there can be security measure in place etc but try explaining that to a company lawyer, good luck. What we need or want is our own server. A server that can be shutdown, rebooted, configuration changes made to it and still not be worried about anyone elses schedule. So, if you hosted a 1000 companies and every company wanted to have 3 servers you would need real estate for 3000 servers, electricity, cooling and manpower. Now lets imagine that you did have that space and infrastructure to house that many servers. How do you grow efficiently? Let say 200 customers wanted to add 2 more servers, your cost to add 400 more servers may be as high as adding a thousand more servers and it may not make sense when you take into account the cost of electricity, cooling etc. So, do you tell your client, no? They would just take their business elsewhere. When Virtual Technology was introduced most hosted solution companies like Rackspace, jumped on the Virtual bandwagon and adopted this technology. This allowed companies to have their own server that was just theirs. They could reboot, shutdown and upgrade when they pleased. Plus from a hosting company point of view they dont need to keep increasing their real estate and related costs to expand their customer base.
Okay so we covered the backend. We looked at the how advancements in technology made the cloud possible but what about the offering. What do cloud services offer us or their business customers and why do they feel confident investing millions of dollars in software and hardware?
BACKUPThere are many companies that offer the ability to backup your important documents for free. We touched on this in class, where we were asked about backing up our home computer data, like home videos, pictures and documents. There are companies like MOZY, Amazon Cloudrive, Google Drive, Skydrive by Microsoft and tons of other companies offering the same service that vary mostly in pricing. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Most home users will take advantage of this service. But businesses will need to plan more about recovery than just a backup. A backup that takes you a week to recover is not really a backup strategy. So when choosing these backup strategies one has to pay attention to how fast they can get you “your” data back.
SAS ( Software as a service)We covered some of these examples in class from the simple Office 365 and google Docs example to the more complicated CRM (Customer Relationship management) offerings like Salesforce etc. These software offerings require a lot of horsepower and a lot of know how to run and be maintained. I like the analogy that you cant buy a Bentley and take it to the