What is the cloud, anyway?

[Eric]

At a recent computing conference in San Francisco, 20-odd CEOs and founders of cloud-related computing companies couldn't agree on what Cloud Computing was! Never mind that Dell would like a trademark on the term, it seems to be used most often as a cure-all for all that ails the computing world. However, as someone who is trying to define cloud computing in a way that truly meets my customer's needs, I'd be curious to know what people expect from the cloud: essentially, letting the people it is supposed to serve define the term. I have my own ideas which show up on my company's website, but I'd like to hear yours.

________________
Eric Novikoff
ENKI
www.enkiconsulting.net (http://www.enkiconsulting.net)
"Enterprise-class managed cloud computing"

[mark]

Hi, Eric!

I still don't have a 100% grasp on the concept behind Cloud Computing, so I can't really share, but I'm sure looking forward to what other people have to say!

[esalazar]

Hey Eric,

I don't believe I'll be able to give you an all encompassing answer to the general "what is the Cloud" question, but I'll at least try to give some amount of feedback as to what I expect it to be.

First off, I do not believe that we are anywhere close to defining the "One True Cloud" Meaning that there really is not one cloud out there, so much as there are many clouds that you can decide to be a part of.

You might see that there are various "Cloud Vendors" out there, but oddly enough Cloud isn't really featured in their name. Lets just say that this battle is far from over, and rather than get into a religious war over who is better and who supports what, lets just break it down to what we really want out of it.

In the simplest of terms, we want affordable computing. I believe that the cloud will eventually be the great equalizer of the startup. How does a startup even begin to compete with the enterprise? Limited budgets, little to no name recognition, and bare bone staffs. These are the major differences.

However, with the inception of the cloud, the startup can now deliver and develop products that can compete with the enterprise. Not to mention, the cloud could allow the start-up to provide an alternative to enterprise companies. It is a tough battle, but by leveraging a pay as you go model for the compute power you need, you are no longer forced as a developer to buy server farms of your own, nor are you forced to spend a large amount of your seed money by hiring a staff to maintain these farms. Second, instead of going with a hosted system provider and paying the larger amounts of money, you can simply fire up your own servers virtually and pay the small hourly fees. (of course I'm talking of Amazon's EC2 in this example, as other cloud vendors charge differently)

But what we know so far is that EC2's inception of cloud computing, is attempting to break both the buy your own server model, and the expensive on demand model.

This can be thought of on 2 sides.

1. The company as a customer
(cost saving on my resources internally, servers/storage/IT Staff)

2. The company as a vendor
(reducing the cost of my offering to the customer. Providing solutions that do not force them to purchase the above mentioned)

In my own organization we find that we can use both of these two aspects.
Giving us a win on the side of cost savings, and a win on the side of offering a competitive and affordable product.

If you want more info on what we do you can check the link in my sig, but I do not really want to plug my product here, so much as I just want to share how we use the cloud, and how we are finding ourselves to be more competitive because of it.

So in summation, from the cloud, I expect cost reduction and more affordable solutions, to make my organization more competitive.


--Ed

[Eric]

Hi Ed, I think you made it pretty clear that your primary expectation from the Cloud is cost, cost, cost. You ask how a startup can compete with the enterprise, but while I think cost is a part of that, most startups are offering a product that the enterprise either hasn't thought of or is too slow to come up with so in fact their cost of doing business may not be a major issue because they have a competitive advantage that allows them to make a profit. Your business - cloud-based-test - was recently listed by a pundit as the single most appropriate use for cloud computing, so it makes sense that you're excited about it! But even you are assuming a few things besides cost that are important, including ease of use for your application and scalability (called elasticity by those whose viewpoint is that of a provider rather than a consumer.)

However, as a cloud provider, I see that my customers and potential customers have a number of other expectations from cloud computing besides cost. And in fact, they may not calculate cost as dollars per instance-hour, but rather what is the overall impact to their business, cost-wise from deploying to the cloud. This cost could include hiring knowledgeable staff, rewriting their application, re-architecting to avoid potential downtime, etc. Or they may care more about costs other than instance-hour costs including storage or bandwidth charges, for example if they are a video-sharing site.

Some expectations I've seen from potential customers include, in no particular order:
- cost
- reliability
- scalability
- pay-as-you-go billing
- live phone support
- a vendor that cares about their success
- SLA (service level agreement)
- availability of knowledgeable consultants or outsourced operations services on the platform
- suitability to their existing application
- built-in high availability or DR architecture
- availability of add-on services such as monitoring, performance testing, backup, security audits
- certification compliance (such as SAS70)
- flexibility and/or partnership orientation of the cloud vendor as a long-term business partner
- vendor lock-in issues
- level of access to control logic
- hands-off operation of the cloud

I'm sure I've only got a few of the expectations here...

[jsmart]

I feel that most people have a scale issue here.

there will never be "THE" cloud unless you are talking about the internet in general.

clouds are forming.. not A cloud. at some point interfaces like 3tera, Rightscale and others my support more than one "cloud" service.

clouds are still very dependent on the use cases. for example google's "app engine" is a cloud for python developers and is tuned with that in mind, where as, AWS does rapid provisioning of your instances on a shared infrastructure that helps mitigate costs, while AppLogic gives you full control of all images, hardware and deployment locations.

each of these provide a "cloud". Each of these clouds have differing incentives for customers that have different requirements for their applications and data, some cloud customers will never be able to use shared infrastructure because of industry regs on data security and segmentation as well as specific types of security certifications (such as SAAS70 and PCI compliance).

there is never going to be a single service that meets all of our needs. there is always going to be competition in the market place and there should be.

I think the sooner everyone stops asking what is "the cloud" and starts asking what cloud services can do for ME today; the faster the development and deployments of differing services can be added into "THE CLOUD" as the needs become more clear to the providers and the marketplace can actually support building the infrastructure behind those clouds.

[mario]

Should we start a new thread or a new forum section?

And what would you guys like the title to be?

Empowered by the cloud
- Companies that you know of that are cloud empowered
- Why would my company benefit utilizing a cloud environment

Just some thoughts.

Thanks,