Business Trends

Cloud Computing Tools Abound

The sky is the limit  says Burns " for both the number and the types of tools that will eventually help enterprise IT fully embrace the cloud, say industry analysts and cloud integration experts.

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There are currently tools available that can assist IT departments with VM configuration management, help migrate in-house business applications to the cloud, enable full orchestration of cloud services and provide monitoring across multiple clouds. There are also tools that implement management policies in the cloud, set governance parameters and handle encryption management for data flowing around up there.

These tools are being delivered in equal proportions by cloud platform providers, systems integrators, third-party start-ups and established vendors. For complete read see here

Cloud Computing for Beginners

Here is an interesting introduction to Cloud Computing. The Online and email each totally changed the world in their own ways, and cloud computing looks all set to be the next version. There are collections full of guides on this topic, each with a different perspective of what it indicates. The simple meaning is that the internet is used to provide on-demand access to sources, information and programs.

This features in a way similar to sources such as an power lines. A customer just reveals up a internet browser and accesses the needed program and/or source. The customer then gets charged depending on the utilization, same as with sources.

In order for this to work, suppliers offer information facilities which at the same time manage the source demands from several customers. With everything in the information facilities, the organization does not need to have its own IT installation. This implies organizations can get rid of current arrangements and the associated team.

No question this helps you to save a large amount for the organization, but there’s a lot more to it because the organization can now acquire of a information center’s large abilities. The sources it needs and will pay for can be extended or decreased whenever needed. There will be no need to pay for improvements or built-in unwanted potential.

On the other side, suppliers have to be big organizations with comprehensive specialized know-how about handling a information middle, in addition to very strong pouches. Any organization that is preparing to exchange its own IT installation to the reasoning will normally anticipate a advanced level of protection, stability as well as. Of course, a organization can also do cloud computing in things.

This indicates that some areas of the IT specifications can be satisfied by a third-party who provides said need as a assistance over the internet. It can be IaaS or SaaS (Software as a Service) in which programs organised elsewhere can be run on web internet explorer. Or it can be System as a Service, where a growth atmosphere is offered as an internet centered foundation.

The Evolution of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has become a fixture in the IT landscape over recent years. Some debate has even arisen over whether the development of cloud computing counts as evolution or a revolution. Leaving such questions to others (evolution and revolution both signify change, perhaps simply at a different rate or by more or less gradual steps), a brief (and broad) look at the history of the cloud may provide some indicators as to where it’s headed next.

Origins—Maybe

The origins of the cloud are often seen in mainframe computing in the last century. This is a matter also up for some debate, as some cloud proponents like to treat cloud computing as an entirely new phenomenon. Skeptics (or, perhaps, just less excitable types) sometimes see the cloud as nothing new at all, but rather just a rebranding of a computing model that has been around for decades. As with most such arguments, reality is probably somewhere in between. The fundamental model of centralized resources certainly can be traced to mainframe.

This trend of centralization is not trivial, however. As computing technology became smaller, cheaper and thus more accessible to more businesses and consumers, computing power began decentralizing. In businesses, for example, getting computer time became less and less a problem—unlike early computers, which were bulky, expensive and difficult to operate. The connectivity of the Internet, leading to the cloud model, essentially involves a recentralization of compute power. “From a business and management perspective [cloud computing] signifies a return of some of the characteristics of mainframe computing, in terms of power, expense, and centralization of operations and expertise,” notes Peter HJ van Eijk at CircleID (“Cloud Is the New Mainframe”).

The cloud is certainly more sophisticated than mainframe systems in, say, the 1970s or 1980s, and the scope of access is greatly increased. Depending on the particular service, you can potentially access the cloud from anywhere with an Internet connection—although even this isn’t fundamentally different from using a remote computer with a modem to dial into the VAX system at company headquarters to access email or run some “online” program. So, is the cloud revolutionary or evolutionary? That may simply depend on which aspects of the cloud you want to emphasize relative to mainframes or other computing models. For more details here from the source

Cost-Aware Architectures by Werner Vogels

As engineers we are remarkably badly trained in thinking about cost. I don’t mean some big O order of magnitude cost but real dollar cost. You could given me five fault-tolerant algorithms and almost with my eyes closed I could pick the best one. But if you would then ask me what the difference would be in cost between the best and second-best when the system would start to scale I would falter.

I learned how to incorporate cost into architecture the hard way. At Amazon.com the margins are, as in most retail, razor thin and as such any fluctuation in the cost of infrastructure and systems immediately eats into the bottom line. And Amazon.com has many moving pieces, with hundreds and hundreds of internal services, so keeping control over cost, architecturally, is just plain hard. Especially in the days before we had AWS, our cloud services.

The most important concept is that, when you are growing, your cost should grow over the same dimension your revenue is coming in over. For Amazon.com that dimension is number of orders. If orders go up your cost should be allowed to rise as well. Although if you are architected well, you will be able to exploit economies of scale and your  complete story here 

21st Centure Cloud Archietcture according to Werner Vogels

According to Werner Vogels, Architectures in the cloud era should follow “four commandments”: 

• They are controllable (the business can control the architecture), 
• they are resilient,
• they are adaptive (“meaning you are no longer dependent on fixed resources”), and 
• they are data-driven, not model or prediction driven.

Openstack : An Overview

OpenStack is open source software for building clouds. Created to drive industry standards, end cloud lock-in and speed cloud adoption, OpenStack is a common, open platform for both public and private clouds with the support of over 160 industry leading companies, more than 3,000 global project participants and 100,000+ downloads. The open source cloud operating system enables businesses to manage compute, storage and networking resources via a self-service portal and APIs on standard hardware at massive scale. Here is an overview of Openstack from networkcomputing

Back in July 2010, Rackspace Hosting and NASA jointly launched a new open-source cloud initiative known as OpenStack. The ultimate goal was to enable any organization to create and offer cloud computing services that run on standard hardware. Since that date, approximately six revisions of OpenStack have been released, and more than 150 companies have signed up to support the platform.

Simply put, OpenStack is a "cloud operating system" designed for the data center. What's more, OpenStack is also viewed as the kernel for cloud operations, on which vendors can build all sorts of software to run on in the cloud. For complete story read here