NYT
What Cloud Computing Really Means
By ERIC KNORR and GALEN GRUMAN, InfoWorld, IDG
Published: April 7, 2008
Cloud computing is all the rage. "It's become the phrase du jour," says Gartner senior analyst Ben Pring, echoing many of his peers. The problem is that (as with Web 2.0) everyone seems to have a different definition.
As a metaphor for the Internet, "the cloud" is a familiar cliché, but when combined with "computing," the meaning gets bigger and fuzzier. Some analysts and vendors define cloud computing narrowly as an updated version of utility computing: basically virtual servers available over the Internet. Others go very broad, arguing anything you consume outside the firewall is "in the cloud," including conventional outsourcing.
Cloud computing comes into focus only when you think about what IT always needs: a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends IT's existing capabilities.
Cloud computing is at an early stage, with a motley crew of providers large and small delivering a slew of cloud-based services, from full-blown applications to storage services to spam filtering. Yes, utility-style infrastructure providers are part of the mix, but so are SaaS (software as a service) providers such as Salesforce.com. Today, for the most part, IT must plug into cloud-based services individually, but cloud computing aggregators and integrators are already emerging.
InfoWorld talked to dozens of vendors, analysts, and IT customers to tease out the various components of cloud computing. Based on those discussions, here's a rough breakdown of what cloud computing is all about:
1. SaaS
This type of cloud computing delivers a single application through the browser to thousands of customers using a multitenant architecture. On the customer side, it means no upfront investment in servers or software licensing; on the provider side, with just one app to maintain, costs are low compared to conventional hosting. Salesforce.com is by far the best-known example among enterprise applications, but SaaS is also common for HR apps and has even worked its way up the food chain to ERP, with players such as Workday. And who could have predicted the sudden rise of SaaS "desktop" applications, such as Google Apps and Zoho Office?
2. Utility computing
The idea is not new, but this form of cloud computing is getting new life from Amazon.com, Sun, IBM, and others who now offer storage and virtual servers that IT can access on demand. Early enterprise adopters mainly use utility computing for supplemental, non-mission-critical needs, but one day, they may replace parts of the datacenter. Other providers offer solutions that help IT create virtual datacenters from commodity servers, such as 3Tera's AppLogic and Cohesive Flexible Technologies' Elastic Server on Demand. Liquid Computing's LiquidQ offers similar capabilities, enabling IT to stitch together memory, I/O, storage, and computational capacity as a virtualized resource pool available over the network.
3. Web services in the cloud
Closely related to SaaS, Web service providers offer APIs that enable developers to exploit functionality over the Internet, rather than delivering full-blown applications. They range from providers offering discrete business services such as Strike Iron and Xignite to the full range of APIs offered by Google Maps, ADP payroll processing, the U.S. Postal Service, Bloomberg, and even conventional credit card processing services.
4. Platform as a service
Another SaaS variation, this form of cloud computing delivers development environments as a service. You build your own applications that run on the provider's infrastructure and are delivered to your users via the Internet from the provider's servers. Like Legos, these services are constrained by the vendor's design and capabilities, so you don't get complete freedom, but you do get predictability and pre-integration. Prime examples include Salesforce.com's Force.com and Coghead. For extremely lightweight development, cloud-based mashup platforms abound, such as Yahoo Pipes or Dapper.net.
5. MSP (managed service providers)
One of the oldest forms of cloud computing, a managed service is basically an application exposed to IT rather than to end-users, such as a virus scanning service for e-mail or an application monitoring service (which Mercury, among others, provides). Managed security services delivered by SecureWorks, IBM, and Verizon fall into this category, as do such cloud-based anti-spam services as Postini, recently acquired by Google. Other offerings include desktop management services, such as those offered by CenterBeam or Everdream.
6. Service commerce platforms
A hybrid of SaaS and MSP, this cloud computing service offers a service hub that users interact with. They're most common in trading environments, such as expense management systems that allow users to order travel or secretarial services from a common platform that then coordinates the service delivery and pricing within the specifications set by the user. Think of it as an automated service bureau. Well-known examples include Rearden Commerce and Ariba.
7. Internet integration
The integration of cloud-based services is in its early days. OpSource, which mainly concerns itself with serving SaaS providers, recently introduced the OpSource Services Bus, which employs in-the-cloud integration technology from a little startup called Boomi. SaaS provider Workday recently acquired another player in this space, CapeClear, an ESB (enterprise service bus) provider that was edging toward b-to-b integration. Way ahead of its time, Grand Central which wanted to be a universal "bus in the cloud" to connect SaaS providers and provide integrated solutions to customers flamed out in 2005.
Today, with such cloud-based interconnection seldom in evidence, cloud computing might be more accurately described as "sky computing," with many isolated clouds of services which IT customers must plug into individually. On the other hand, as virtualization and SOA permeate the enterprise, the idea of loosely coupled services running on an agile, scalable infrastructure should eventually make every enterprise a node in the cloud. It's a long-running trend with a far-out horizon. But among big metatrends, cloud computing is the hardest one to argue with in the long term.
CORPORATE IT
Let it rise
Oct 23rd 2008
From The Economist print edition
Information technology is turning into a global "cloud" accessible from anywhere, says Ludwig Siegele (interviewed here). What does that mean for the way people conduct business?
IN THE beginning computers were human. Then they took the shape of metal boxes, filling entire rooms before becoming ever smaller and more widespread. Now they are evaporating altogether and becoming accessible from anywhere.
That is about as brief a history of computers as anyone can make it. The point is that they are much more than devices in a box or in a data centre. Computing has constantly changed shape and location—mainly as a result of new technology, but often also because of shifts in demand.
The first "computers" were indeed people. The word originally meant an individual who solved equations, often using a mechanical calculator. Hundreds of them were employed by big companies that needed to do a lot of number-crunching, such as aeroplane manufacturers. It was only around 1945 that the word came to describe machinery.
But even after that, computing kept undergoing mutations—or, in the jargon, platform shifts. The mainframe, the original computing platform, was dethroned by minicomputers, which in turn gave way to personal computers, which are now being pushed aside by hand-held devices and smartphones. With each step the architecture—the underlying structure of computing—became more distributed.
Now, this special report will argue, computing is taking on yet another new shape. It is becoming more centralised again as some of the activity moves into data centres. But more importantly, it is turning into what has come to be called a "cloud", or collections of clouds. Computing power will become more and more disembodied and will be consumed where and when it is needed.
The rise of the cloud is more than just another platform shift that gets geeks excited. It will undoubtedly transform the information technology (IT) industry, but it will also profoundly change the way people work and companies operate. It will allow digital technology to penetrate every nook and cranny of the economy and of society, creating some tricky political problems along the way.
Promise of heaven
Here we go again, you may think. In order to generate new demand, the maturing IT industry keeps creating new buzzwords, often with celestial connotations ("cyberspace", "blogosphere"), which suggest some kind of technological nirvana. The reality is much more down to earth.
Hype is indeed rampant in "cloud computing". The term entered into IT-speak only a year ago and has spread voraciously. Cloud conferences and cloud blogs are multiplying almost as quickly as cloud start-ups. Established IT firms are slapping the new label on old gear.
In fact, the cloud craze may have peaked already, if the number of Google searches is any guide (see chart 1). Cloud computing is bound to go through a "trough of disillusionment", as Gartner, a research firm, calls the phase in the hype cycle when technologies fail to meet expectations and quickly cease to be fashionable. Much still needs to be invented for the computing sky to become truly cloudy.
Yet even if the term is already passé, the cloud itself is here to stay and to grow. It follows naturally from the combination of ever cheaper and more powerful processors with ever faster and more ubiquitous networks. As a result, data centres are becoming factories for computing services on an industrial scale; software is increasingly being delivered as an online service; and wireless networks connect more and more devices to such offerings.
All this allows computing to be disaggregated into components—or "services", in IT parlance. This is why European technologists such as Lutz Heuser, head of research at SAP, a German software giant, like to refer to it as the "internet of services". The cloud metaphor seems more apt. The internet is used mainly by people with personal computers and a physical network connection. Cloud applications, on the other hand, will be used by billions of devices of all kinds, many of them untethered, but will be connected to the "internet of things".
In some ways the cloud is already hanging in the sky, especially for consumers. According to a recent study, 69% of Americans connected to the web use some kind of "cloud service", including web-based e-mail or online data storage (see chart 2). The best example is Google, the biggest online search company by far, which now offers a plethora of web-based applications such as word-processing or online spreadsheets.
Learning to float
Companies, too, have been moving into the cloud, albeit much more cautiously. Financial institutions in particular have for some time been building "computing grids". Firms that provide enterprise software as a service (SaaS) over the internet, such as Salesforce.com and NetSuite, have been growing steadily.
In the years to come companies are likely to venture much farther. For one, operators of computing clouds such as Amazon and Google have shown that this is a far more efficient way of running IT systems. Secondly, many firms will find they have no choice. The way in which their IT infrastructure has grown is proving unsustainable. Most corporate data centres today are complex warrens of underused hardware that require more and more people, space and power to keep them going. The current economic malaise will increase the pressure on companies to become more efficient. More has to be done with less, which is cloud computing's main promise.
This special report will chronicle the rise of the cloud and try to predict where it is heading. It will start by looking at the technology. Computing clouds are immensely complex, but can be roughly divided into three layers: infrastructure, applications and the periphery where they meet the real world. These will be discussed in turn. The report will go on to consider the impact the cloud will have on the IT industry and the economy as a whole. The conclusion will look at what might stop the cloud from growing ever thicker: regulation and worries about the safety of both personal and corporate data.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a technology visionary at IBM, compares cloud computing to the Cambrian explosion some 500m years ago when the rate of evolution speeded up, in part because the cell had been perfected and standardised, allowing evolution to build more complex organisms. Similarly, argues Mr Wladawsky-Berger, the IT industry spent much of its first few decades developing the basic components of computing. Now that these are essentially standardised, bigger and more diverse systems can emerge. "For computing to reach a higher level", he says, "its cells had to be commoditised."
Where the cloud meets the ground
Oct 23rd 2008
From The Economist print edition
Data centres are quickly evolving into service factories
IT IS almost as easy as plugging in a laser printer. Up to 2,500 servers—in essence, souped-up personal computers—are crammed into a 40-foot (13-metre) shipping container. A truck places the container inside a bare steel-and-concrete building. Workers quickly connect it to the electric grid, the computer network and a water supply for cooling. The necessary software is downloaded automatically. Within four days all the servers are ready to dish up videos, send e-mails or crunch a firm's customer data.
This is Microsoft's new data centre in Northlake, a suburb of Chicago, one of the world's most modern, biggest and most expensive, covering 500,000 square feet (46,000 square metres) and costing $500m. One day it will hold 400,000 servers. The entire first floor will be filled with 200 containers like this one. Michael Manos, the head of Microsoft's data centres, is really excited about these containers. They solve many of the problems that tend to crop up when putting up huge data centres: how to package and transport servers cheaply, how to limit their appetite for energy and how to install them only when they are needed to avoid leaving expensive assets idle.
But containers are not the only innovation of which Mr Manos is proud. Microsoft's data centres in Chicago and across the world are equipped with software that tells him exactly how much power each application consumes and how much carbon it emits. "We're building a global information utility," he says.
Engineers must have spoken with similar passion when the first moving assembly lines were installed in car factories almost a century ago, and Microsoft's data centre in Northlake, just like Henry Ford's first large factory in Highland Park, Michigan, may one day be seen as a symbol of a new industrial era.
Before Ford revolutionised carmaking, automobiles were put together by teams of highly skilled craftsmen in custom-built workshops. Similarly, most corporate data centres today house armies of "systems administrators", the craftsmen of the information age. There are an estimated 7,000 such data centres in America alone, most of them one-off designs that have grown over the years, reflecting the history of both technology and the particular use to which it is being put. It is no surprise that they are egregiously inefficient. On average only 6% of server capacity is used, according to a study by McKinsey, a consultancy, and the Uptime Institute, a think-tank. Nearly 30% are no longer in use at all, but no one has bothered to remove them. Often nobody knows which application is running on which server. A widely used method to find out is: "Let's pull the plug and see who calls."
Limited technology and misplaced incentives are to blame. Windows, the most pervasive operating system used in data centres, allows only one application to run on any one server because otherwise it might crash. So IT departments just kept adding machines when new applications were needed, leading to a condition known as "server sprawl" (see chart 3). This made sense at the time: servers were cheap, and ever-rising electricity bills were generally charged to a company's facilities budget rather than to IT.
To understand the technology needed to industrialise data centres, it helps to look at the history of electricity. It was only after the widespread deployment of the "rotary converter", a device that transforms one kind of current into another, that different power plants and generators could be assembled into a universal grid. Similarly, a technology called "virtualisation" now allows physically separate computer systems to act as one.