Cloud computing: getting the service at your fingertips

Cloud computing has been hot in recent times, and the topic of it is overwhelming. And the progress of cloud computing has also risen from the previous conceptual speculation to the product stage, and the discussion about the impact of cloud computing on various industries has become increasingly deep. It is worth mentioning that cloud computing will inevitably have a profound impact on the development of mobile applications in the future.

Several key words

People's understanding of the concept of cloud computing is similar. In general, cloud computing is a business computing model. It distributes computing tasks across resource pools of large numbers of computers, enabling applications to acquire computing power, storage space, and various software services as needed. In addition, cloud computing is the development of parallel computing, distributed computing, and grid computing, or the commercial implementation of these computer science concepts. At the same time, cloud computing is the result of a mixed evolution of virtualization, utility computing, IaaS (infrastructure as a service), PaaS (platform as a service), and SaaS (software as a service).

At the first cloud computing forum held by the China Electronics Society not long ago, some professionals gave several key words of cloud computing. Some pointed out that low cost is very important; some think that collaboration and topology are important features of cloud computing; others believe that security and virtualization are key points. In general, cloud computing has the following characteristics: hyperscale, high scalability, virtualization, on-demand service, high reliability, extreme low cost, versatility, and so on. It is precisely because of these characteristics that cloud computing has received unprecedented attention.

In the description of the nature of cloud computing, the views of the industry are not the same. Yang Cheng, chief research and development officer of Intel Asia Pacific R&D Co., Ltd. Software and Services Division, commented that cloud computing "is precious because it is not expensive; it is extraordinary because it is not complicated." Yao Hongyu of Youyou Startups pointed out that "cloud computing makes the service at your fingertips." Fan Chenggong, general manager of EMC China R&D Center, believes that cloud computing is “visual and visibly distant.” Ni Guangnan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, pointed out that cloud computing will become the world's largest cloud computing, just like the current Chinese Internet. Li Bohu, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, also pointed out that in order to achieve efficient and high-quality cloud computing, it is necessary to bring greater innovation in applications and technologies.

It is worth mentioning that how to smoothly and securely transition the existing enterprise data center to the cloud computing model is also a topic of great concern. Among them, innovation in operating models is more important than purely technical solutions.

Many actors

There is no doubt that companies and institutions joining the cloud computing army are becoming more and more. Not long ago, Open Cirrus, a cloud computing collaboration research organization, announced that three new organizations have joined the organization. Open Cirrus is a global, multi-data center open source test bed for cloud computing research. Previously, Open Cirrus had already owned many well-known companies and institutions. Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Yahoo, Illinois State University, Karlsruhe College in Germany, and information and communication development agencies in Singapore are all members. New institutions include the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Korea Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, and the Strategic Research and Development Agency MIMOS, a division of the Malaysian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.

It is reported that the main function of Open Cirrus is "test bed", which aims to provide physical and virtual cloud computing resources worldwide by combining various members to provide development and testing functions for cloud computing systems and applications. Currently, there are more than 50 research projects underway in the test bed, which simulates a real, global, Internet-wide environment, testing applications and measuring the performance of infrastructure and services to build large-scale cloud systems.

After the expansion of the Open Cirrus community, it will help you gain new methods and skills to realize the full potential of cloud computing faster. In addition, Open Cirrus has set up a new test bed research site, which has expanded the number of research sites around the world to nine, creating a cloud computing test bed for researchers in different regions.

Ovum analysts pointed out that the cloud computing industry needs a global, neutral, independent platform platform for some equipment vendors. On this platform, the R&D team can conduct some basic research and solution testing. These topics are all about the problems that cloud computing must eventually overcome as a technology that companies can safely adopt.

Currently, cloud innovation was initially driven by several major application vendors, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce. Technological innovations are dominated by vendors like Cisco, Citrix, IBM, Intel, HP, Sun, and VMware. Of course, we must not forget the innovation of many small and medium-sized manufacturers and technology innovators who are driving the development of cloud computing.

What are the risks that corporate CIOs need to guard against?

Although SMEs are also in the midst of cloud computing, their voice and influence clearly cannot compete with those IT giants. From the perspective of corporate CIOs, we must also be aware of the risks, because early cloud computing research is almost all driven by “giant” companies, which inevitably “develop” the “hidden rules” in this field. And a lot of patents, which was the case when any major technology in the past occupied the market. Almost 90% of the patents and standards were in the early inventors. How to circumvent the risks posed by such standards and patents is a problem that CIOs must consider now.

There is no doubt that cloud computing is expected to become a more open, interoperable new model to meet the needs of enterprise computing. However, it also needs to follow the principle of economies of scale in essence, and the necessary way to achieve economies of scale, in addition to the advanced nature of its technology, requires the standard to be widely recognized by the industry.

From this point of view, many enterprise CIOs should stand at the forefront of cloud computing research to ensure that cloud computing research and development have more open elements and future.

Initiating a change in the mobile app model

Apple's iPhone has an unprecedented impact on mobile applications, new applications have sprung up, and mobile stores have "opened" one after another. However, it is worth noting that many applications require mobile terminals to have certain computing power, which will greatly limit the development of this industry. However, the new computing architecture, cloud computing, is expected to fundamentally change such limitations, which are expected to fundamentally change the development, acquisition and use of mobile applications. The well-known research institute ABI believes that such a structure is expected to replace the existing mobile application model in 2014, becoming the most popular application model on the market, and will generate nearly 20 billion US dollars in revenue by the end of 2014.

Currently, developers of mobile applications face the challenge of multiple mobile operating systems. Whether they are writing applications for one operating system or developing different versions of the same application for different operating systems, one thing is the same, that is, the more The more complex the program requires the phone to have faster processing speed and memory. With web technology, many mobile apps can run on the server instead of locally. In this case, the processing speed and storage requirements of the mobile phone are expected to be greatly reduced, and it is sufficient for the developer to write a version for one program. This trend is still in the "infancy" stage, but ABI believes that this model will become mainstream in the future.

Although this model is very promising, it is not without challenges. The main challenge is whether the network and the terminal can maintain interoperability at all times. If the phone loses its signal or the connection to the network is lost, the cloud-based mobile app will also stop. However, the emergence of some new programming languages, such as HTML 5, can save existing data and progress for the mobile phone, so that once the mobile phone is connected to the network, it can continue the original process, but even then, it will cause users. The experience is reduced. This will place higher demands on the carrier network.

Cloud computing will bring unprecedented changes to mobile applications. For business users, they can get more collaboration and data sharing through mobile devices. Individual users can also monitor their home security systems, PCs and DVRs via remote access applications. You can also share pictures, videos, or synchronize your phone book and schedule from your community network.

China Mobile's big cloud platform

At the first China Cloud Computing Forum, Huang Xiaoqing, president of China Mobile Communications Research Institute, pointed out that China Mobile is a company with great potential for cloud computing. Because China Mobile has a large amount of customer data and service data prepared for customers, it requires a lot of calculations. At the same time, China Mobile also hopes to conduct deep mining and in-depth marketing for these users, which also requires a lot of calculations. This kind of operation can be greatly improved if it is implemented by cloud computing. Operators themselves are huge information makers and information processors.

In addition, as network bandwidth increases, it becomes possible to turn cloud computing into a public service. China Mobile's application data center provides information services for users including government, enterprises and individual users. These services are also expected to be realized in the future through cloud computing to achieve higher efficiency and lower costs. Serving companies that need large-capacity computing. This is also the operator's demand for cloud computing.

"The extensive cooperation is an important method for cloud computing to take root in China. The China Mobile Communications Research Institute has conducted in-depth research over the years. We propose to build an open cloud computing platform based on open source technology." Huang Xiaoqing pointed out that "in a certain sense The development of cloud computing in China depends on open source, but also considers specific issues, such as data security issues. In addition, cloud computing is commercial, operational and maintenance becomes operational-level management and services. These are some important difficulties and challenges."

It is reported that China Mobile Research Institute has proposed a "big cloud" platform, and based on this platform, has designed a lot of management software and developed related applications. Including data mining, storage, large-capacity databases, search engines, and more.

In fact, in addition to China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom are also the creators and service providers of massive data, especially in the Chinese market. Due to the large number of mobile users, the demand for cloud computing by operators will become more and more urgent. In addition, the emergence of cloud computing will undoubtedly provide another possibility for operators to improve efficiency and reduce costs. How much impact cloud computing will have on the entire communications industry in the future, let us wait and see.