Spheres, clouds and other buzz words
To
start with cloud computing is not Microsoft’s nor IBM’s not even any of the big
players concept (good to see that the fight is not on this one). It was
actually Amazon who were the first to offer such a service they named it ECS –
Elastic Computing Cloud
The concept is very simple applications are
like little lives and lives are seasonal all application require extra
processing power on very high immediate demand for temporary situation not CIO insane
enough to size their application &
data based on the peak load it is too much money that will be spent to cater
for a situation that spans limited time frame and then this computing power
will stay idle burning money (starting with electricity & heat).
Consider the following the scenarios an
eCommerce application serving users this eCommerce application gets 10 times
the regular concurrent users at Christmas times – so how IT can handle this?
Consider another more relevant scenario a
site serving exam results for high school education (Thanya Amma) obviously the
peak is the day the results are published – so how IT can handle this?
Typically speaking IT manages this by
adding servers to handle the load (sometimes scientifically driven and other
not) obviously the effort to add/configure
an array of 70 servers and then removing them next day is an insane job!
If you have a cloud that contains virtually
unlimited amount of computing resources that you can allocate de-allocate quickly
that will solve IT problems. The problem these clouds are either too complex to
build and manage or the intellectual property is too expensive to give away
even as a license so Microsoft, Amazon offer this as a service (think S+S or SaaS).
Microsoft Azure is Microsoft offering on this front. However you will not be
able to run it locally as a matter of fact you will have to write your code
slightly different to run it on the cloud sounds fair – but how about your data
center where you want the same solution is needed locally (for any reason I am
quite sure you can think of some)
It was until very recent that this was not
possible until VMware came and introduced vSphare (http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=networking_and_internet&articleId=9131898&taxonomyId=16&intsrc=kc_top)
which is a cloud that you can host locally giving you all the features you need
locally – I Love them (not everything they do but I still love them) – the expectation
that the cloud not be as smart hosting Microsoft based application but will definitely
be a brilliant thing for open source solution specifically Linux/PHP/Perl apps