IT TRENDS
Cloud computing: service providers bear the burden
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Customer companies need not run their own data centres
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‘Outlook cloudy’ is generally seen as a gloomy prediction when made by meteorologists. The clouds they are talking about are usually the dark-n-heavy ones, preceding storms or ‘bad weather.’ But in Cyberspace, clouds are good news — the more, the heavier, the merrier.
A heavy-weight new entrant has appeared across the computing firmament: At its annual Professional Developers’ Conference (PDC2008), in Los Angeles, last month, Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie, announced the company’s own offering in the growing list of products and services tapping into what is being called cloud computing.
It is to be called ‘Azure,’ a platform for service-based solutions compatible with Microsoft’s tools like .Net, SQL and Visual Studio.
The platform will allow customer companies to do away with the hassle of running their own data centres — shifting the burden to service providers who will put it out in the ‘cloud. ’
That’s just a new way of saying ‘Web’: the enveloping cloud of Internet-ready information, see?
Poor recycling
Terminology-wise this is poor recycling — but in operational terms, too, cloud computing has been around for some time now.
The common thread running through all these cloudy ‘avatars’ is the same: shift your data from servers and storage in your own physical space —to the Web. Just pay someone, per terabyte or petabyte to store it for you; retrieve it as fast as you would have done; and look after it for you as long as you sign up for a service agreement.
Getting your enterprise on to the cloud has become such a priority for industry, that hundreds of ‘techies’ are slogging at a cloud computing Boot Camp, being held this very minute (Nov 20) in San Jose, in the heart of the US Silicon Valley as part of the world’s largest cloud computing conference and Expo.
Amazon is considered a cloud computing pioneer, providing corporate customers access to its own data centres as part of Amazon Web Services.
Google addresses the consumer and small-business end of this concept: GoogleDocs allow users to create and store documents in a variety of popular formats in their own (largely) free caches on its own servers.
Eliminating the need
Long before someone dreamed up the term cloud computing, SalesForce.com was doing just that.
Earlier this month, it held ‘Dreamforce 2008,’ its annual developer conference in San Francisco, where it launched Force.com for Facebook: a new set of tools and services that will enable developers to harness the Facebook and Force.com platforms for building new applications — where social meets the enterprise.
Force.com for Amazon Web Services (AWS): another set of such tools and services to help enterprises build new business applications, leveraging Force.com with the storage and compute capabilities of Amazon’s S3 and EC2 web services.
If virtualization is a key component of cloud computing, the industry leader in virtualization — VM Ware — clearly had a head start in getting its own head in the cloud.
And now the action has shifted to India. IBM launched its first Cloud Computing Centre in Bangalore on September 24.
Yahoo is collaborating with Computational Research Labs to harness the latter’s Eka Super computer in Pune for cloud computing research.
HP is another leader in the cloud computing space. “Our application services professionals are engaged developing solutions and deploying them for customers in the areas of printing and publishing to bring about a paradigm shift in our lives.
For instance, moving technology from printer to printing.” says Srihari Atmakuri, Head of Engineering Services at HP’s Global Delivery Application Services in India.
And to highlight how its own tools and technologies were ‘made’ for the cloud, Microsoft points to the work at Infosys, where engineers have created a cloud computing solution for auto dealers, using SQL data services.
Ancient benediction
It also hinted that when the next iteration of its PC operating system — Windows 7 — appeared sometime late next year, the complementary Office suite, in all likelihood would go to the cloud.
The Chinese had an ancient benediction: “May you live in interesting times.” IT’s time to update it for the new Web-enabled Age: “May you live to see cloudy times!”
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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