A metaphor for cloud computing

In the socioeconomic underdevelopment, a farmer wants to eat eggs, so he raised a chicken himself, then he to raise the chicken for himself, you need to build a simple chicken coop, but also need to manage and raise the chicken in peacetime. This is a basic scene, this scene should be explained below:


　　


farmers have to be eggs instead of chickens, eggs that we say serve the ability to provide, and the chicken that produces this ability is likened to various IT infrastructures


　　


chickens are their own IT hardware, including computers, storage, and networks that can fall into this range


　　


Chicken Coop can be understood as a data center physical environment, including the computer room, the computer room supporting a variety of physical infrastructure


　　


the management and rearing of chickens, that is, daily it operations and costs.


　　


in the process, farmers found some problems, first of all, they do not need to eat eggs every day, but chickens will produce eggs every day, they need to take the extra eggs in the market to sell or exchange other products. Second, they need eggs, but they need to pay for eggs to buy chickens, build a chicken coop, raise chickens a series of cost and manpower input. Then we have to discuss the economy has not developed to a certain stage of time, why did not appear professional chicken farm production of eggs. Specific reasons include:


　　


did not form economies of scale, and the immediate establishment of a chicken farm could not reflect the cost savings resulting from the scale effect. To achieve this goal often requires the emergence of modern and automated chicken farms.


　　


Other external conditions, such as market exchange, transport facilities, logistics and distribution system. If centralized, farmers do not have the convenient and quick means to eat the eggs they need.


　　


and with the development of social economy, there has been a special chicken farm, fast logistics system to ensure that the market to provide a large number of eggs, and farmers will no longer raise chickens, and change to go to the market to buy eggs as needed. and a specialized chicken farm is similar to the data center in cloud computing, it is a capability to provide the center. And fast logistics system that corresponds to the high-speed development of the Internet bandwidth (this is actually a necessary condition for the emergence of cloud computing). We see several changes in the process.


　　


users no longer care about chickens or chicken coop, and chicken feeding problems. They only relate to eggs, the chicken eggs do not care.


　　


users can buy eggs on demand and pay as needed, there is no waste of resources.


　　


farmers own chickens, chicken coop may no longer need, the rest is only a large chicken farm, all the original farmers built their own chicken coop are concentrated in large chicken farms. The corresponding domain IT infrastructure is all cloud-formatted.


　　


why a specialized chicken farm appears to be possible, first chicken farm itself scale and automation, greatly reduced the cost of the unit eggs, followed by developed distribution network and marketing system to facilitate the consumption of eggs. Corresponding to cloud computing is, as the computing power and storage capacity to provide the center, must have a large-scale and intensive characteristics, the corresponding distribution network and marketing system corresponds to the high-speed Internet.


　　


corresponding to a large chicken farm, it is a capacity to provide the center, corresponding to the feeding of the chicken itself is not a customer to want products, but the need for chicken eggs. A large chicken farm may correspond to a number of customers, here we first assume that not the end of the consumer, and the corresponding years of large-scale supermarkets that terminal retail center. In order to facilitate effective management of all capacity, the chicken farm itself can be divided into a number of standard feeding units, allocated to different breeders for management. This will provide a more accurate guide to the number of eggs that each feed unit can produce per day. Note here:


　　

The
feeding unit is similar to the capability-providing unit in cloud computing, and the capability-providing unit can be implemented through virtualization in cloud computing.


　　

The size of
feeding unit is very important, it is too big for management, too small management workload is too big.


　　


Corresponding to large supermarkets, often because they are in the region and the crowd, the demand for eggs are often different, a supermarket may be the end of the month to supply a large quantity, and some may be the need for the month of the supply of large quantities. So where are the advantages of centralization now? If there are 10 supermarkets, each need the largest supply capacity is 1000 eggs, then whether the need to provide 10,000 capacity of the chicken farm? Obviously the answer is not, because we need different time period, there are often 5,000 eggs to provide the ability to meet the needs of chicken farms, corresponding to a chicken farm can be flexible according to the time period of the deployment of eggs produced every day. Specifically as follows:


　　


is a loosely coupled relationship between a feeding unit and a supermarket, and a supermarket may require 1 or more feeding units.


　　


Farms can be flexibly deployed to different supermarkets according to demand.


　　


Supermarkets are fully charged for demand and usage, and will not pay for the cost of affluent feeding units when demand falls.


　　


If new supermarket customers are introduced, it is easier for chicken farms to add new feeding units to meet market demand.


　　


optimization capability design, to meet the maximum resource utilization, and reduce costs.


　　


here is another key feature of what we call cloud computing, a key feature that can be called elastic Computing, unlimited scaling, dynamic resource scheduling, and more. The key is to be able to flexibly on-demand resource scheduling and distribution, the ability itself can be flexible expansion.