Cloud Computing and My Obsession with it

Cloud Computing and my obsession with it.

Part -1:

I like anything that does not bind you to a certain framework or thinking while you keep evolving your own, configurable set of values deriving from various sources. Most of our lives, just like what Robert Pirsig says in ZMM, is like a Chautauqua.

Cloud Computing is a refreshing bout of fresh air for the bound, hostage, clustered society who want freedom! Okay ‘ll stop my rhetoric and begin with the basics. My obsession with this started a year back and one of my most fundamental questions was ‘How does this differ from Grid Computing and utility computing’? The following paragraphs specify what I have understood so far as the cloud’s evolution and are by no means that of an expert. Only amateurists travel by Chautauquas.

The first thing I identified within cloud computing is that it feeds off virtualization. Now that’s a big difference. Earlier we had cluster computing, similar to what Google did about a decade ago wiring together many small computing platforms and PCs to make ‘one big’ computer. Google has the best of minds working for them and they could aim for such a thing. But companies whose competencies were not from parallel processing or distributed computing had to adjust to buying mammoth super computers or hand over the applications with proprietary OS, applications, configurations to big data centers such as Rackspace in return for a hefty monthly fee. With virtualization around and the Hypervisors and ESx servers in, we are already looking forward to reducing the cost f computing, forty percent of which is power consumption alone not withstanding the associated niceties of freedom from maintenance and freedom from higher costs of ownership.

However I again thought that cloud computing services are largely storage providers. I had questions about how they distributed data management, security management, access provisioning. With memory and hard disk prices coming down at a rate that internet bandwidth is not able to catch up what would happen to massive storages across the world which would effectively hit the bottleneck when the data is transported across the world via cables? Will companies take the risk of cables being cut during a war or a natural catastrophe? The human tendency is to keep your secrets closest to you!

I checked on how services are offered. While I give specific details in my next blog, I roughly found that prices were based on one or more of these combinations.

- Number of database access,

- Network upload and download units,

- No. of instructions, TFLOPS and of course on the

- Disk storage.

A highly evolved provider offers a lot more services on mashup services on top of these to the topmost provider on the other end of the spectrum who provides an entire virtual data center for you which you can drag and drop and edit using a virtual data center editor. Howzzat for technology enthusiasts!.

So what new jobs are emerging now? Well, soon the typical IT administrator will vanish and in his/her place we will have a highly analytical administrator who can calculate whether the applications they want to cloud-source is more DB intensive or disk intensive or I/O intensive J. You always need to know the basic computer architecture and there is no running away from it.

Similarly the best programmers and designers would be those who can write applications or APIs that manages federation, data consistency, access controls, P2P and virtual distributed Ethernet.

In my next post (part-II) I will write about how I see different combinations of providers showing up which also is an indicator of how this technology is emerging.