Nick Ross, Cloud Practice Manager at Applied Computer Solutions, spoke.
A Brief History of the Cloud: The history of the cloud starts with the work of J. C. R. Licklider at ARPA, which led to the development of time sharing mainframes in the 1960s. Time sharing led to an interconnected network of computers, allowing resource pooling. Ultimately, this led to the ARPAnet, the precursor to the Internet.
The cloud allows for infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service. An example of the power of the cloud is SETI@home, which allows people to donate the idle cycles of their home PCs to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
The cloud needs an infrastructure, supplied by companies like VMWare, Citrix, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, and HP. On top of that runs middleware and frameworks such as Spring.
Benefits of the cloud include on demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service.
Why use the cloud? The cloud’s rapid elasticity and agility allow you to lower your costs. Rather than needing to keep your own resources sufficient to handle your peak usage, you can expand and consume additional resources for surges of traffic, whether cyclical or temporary. For this reason, a fifth of all storage being sold in 2014 will go for the cloud.
The cloud increases cost efficiency. You can consume resources as needed, without a huge capital outlay. Whether it makes sense to keep infrastructure internal depends on the length of the project. Ross produced a chart showing the cloud in general and his company’s service in particular to be cheaper than using internal resources in general.
The cost comparison isn’t just about initial costs, but also about things like payroll, software maintenance. Some costs go down when you go to the cloud (power, storage), while others don’t.
A normal project life cycle involves some ideas that will succeed and some that will fail. Using the cloud allows you to increase and decrease your usage based on how successful a project proves to be. Cloud providers can mix their customers’ usage together to achieve high levels of utilization.
Some companies, such as hospitals, need IT bandwidth but aren’t in the IT business. IT isn’t their core value, so someone else may be able to provide it better.
Advantages of the private cloud:
- Rapid deployment
- Self-service portals
- Metering and chargeback
- Configuration management
The cloud is growing. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are growing. People look to the cloud for better value, better response, and better capability. The cloud has led to a shadow IT, in organizations where the regular IT is not equipped to do what employees need to do their work.
What do you need from the cloud? Customers say they need security and safety. Ross assured us that the cloud offered the same or better security compared to internal resources. [LG: Here I thought of hospitals and HIPAA, and the military's classified networks. "Same or better security" might be relative to your security needs and internal security expertise.] Cloud providers have knowledge of auditing and compliance standards, and how to protect and manage services. They know how to handle FBI warrants, and what levels of encryption to use.
Many companies find that their internal security can readily be compromised by social engineering. A test with the question “Whoever has the best password gets a free iPod” got some high level passwords. The cloud is held to a higher standard.
The cloud has ample security, but has problems with cross-compatibility and portability.
Could anyone have predicted the global social impact of Twitter? The original Twitter was built in 8 days.
“The Eagle has landed”: We reached the moon with less computing power than Nick Ross holds in his hand right now.
Q) What about outages, such as the recent Blackberry outage? [LG: These notes are from a talk given right after the October 2011 Blackberry outage.]
A) This is why we need standards, such as deploying to multiple services. Amazon has had partial outages, but hasn’t gone down, because it deploys across numerous availability zones.
Q) But everybody has outages, e.g. electrical. You can’t avoid these, especially if you’re small.
A) There are better levels of availability if you use the cloud, even for startups.
[...] SoTeC 2011: Dehumidifying the Cloud [...]