Cloud computing: the opposite of myth

I've been through the myth world of microcomputers to supercomputers, from emails to the various stages of the Internet,

Development of applications from parallel computing (parallel comouting), to decentralized computing (decentralized computing), to distributed Computing (distributed computing), Telnet remote in the computer with more than 3,000 CPUs (such as Japan's so-called fifth generation of computers) on the use of 1024 CPUs to verify their own programs, but also through the most rapid communication of the PC Ethernet composition cluster for further verification ...

can this cloud rain?

Now, I am old, cloud computing comes again ...

Is there anyone else out there in the clouds? Cloud computing is the current buzzword, and Google, Salesforce.com, Microsoft, and Amazon are swarming with people who want to get involved. The problem is: a year has passed and 2009 is coming, and these companies are not yet widely used in cloud computing services. At the same time, people will have to define and clarify many of the "cloud" nonsense.

This is the selling point of Gartner's analyst Daryl Plummer and Thomas Bittman at the Gartner Emerging technology meeting in Las Vegas. Plummer admits that many of the details of cloud computing have no clue. "We also need to have a lot of evolution. "Plummer said.

Another selling point: IT managers look for a definition of cloud computing like headless flies. There is a good reason for this: cloud computing is still a conceptual thing for companies.

Cloud computing is largely misunderstood, but it is a big deal. In fact, cloud computing can be comparable to the E-commerce revolution. The use of "cloud" terminology in marketing materials by High-tech suppliers will take some time to sort through. In fact, Plummer points out, the company will not be using the cloud in the usual five years or so.

If time is not enough, the misunderstanding of cloud computing is not a problem. Plummer and Bittman compiled a very descriptive slide about myths. Myth is raging in the IT industry and cloud computing is doomed. Look at the ' cloud ' people will see the myth, not the truth. "The two analysts said.

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What is cloud computing? A study of myth

As the phenomenon becomes more popular, cloud computing myths become more and more divine. Don't let promises mislead your work.

One myth: Cloud computing is an architectural or infrastructure

Cloud computing industry chain

Myth Two: Each supplier will have a different "cloud"

Myth Three: SaaS is "cloud"

Myth Four: Cloud computing is a new revolution

Myth Five: Remote computing is cloud computing

Myth Six: The Internet and the Web are "clouds"

Myth Seven: All things will be in the cloud

Myth Eight: "Cloud" makes private networks disappear

So what is the definition? According to Gartner, Cloud computing is "a way of computing the ability of a large scale of it-related capabilities to be provided to multiple external customers on the Internet as a service." ”

The English definition means that "cloud" should only provide a service based on fees, it has no place to limit and support economies of scale. Plummer also dismissed doubts that there would be only a few big cloud-computing providers. In fact, the cloud will span vendors and feature shared resources.

Is cloud really the next boss? No doubt:

-by 2012, 80% of Fortune 1000 companies will pay for some cloud computing services, and 30% will pay for cloud infrastructure fees.
-From now until 2010, more than 80% of businesses will use cloud computing for very large data queries, short-term large-scale parallel workloads, or it uses that have little to do with non-it infrastructures.

But cloud computing is not the savior. In fact, there are a lot of things that can't go into the cloud. Let's look at the drawbacks:

What are the barriers to cloud computing?

Service Management: Technical immaturity

Scalability: Parallel processing-no problem, sequential processing-problematic

Cost factors: Limited economies of scale, unless customers are willing to exchange data or advertising for services

Cultural factors: credit, borrowing, and sharing consciousness

Connection status: Like the Internet, unless paying higher fees

High availability: Stateless workloads-no problem; a nationality workload-the problem is the same as the enterprise

Custom: Difficult--at least in a single application

The fundamental problem: there is a lot of work to be done. Now, it's best to prepare for cloud computing and be careful with your marketing rhetoric. (translation: Shumann)

Cloud Computing-the beautiful myth shines into reality edit this section back to the directory

The current situation of cloud computing

Cloud computing is the current high heat of the IT industry, because it is the result of a variety of technology mixed evolution, its maturity is higher, and large companies to promote, the development is extremely rapid. Big companies such as Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo are the pioneers of cloud computing.

Amazon uses flexible computing Clouds (EC2) and simple storage services (S3) to provide computing and storage services for the enterprise. Amazon's revenue from cloud computing has reached $100 million trillion, according to data from Third-party statistical agencies. Cloud computing is one of Amazon's fastest growing businesses.

Google is the biggest consumer of cloud computing. Google search engines are built on the support of more than 1 million servers in more than 200 locations, and the number of these facilities is growing rapidly. Google Earth, maps, Gmail and docs also use these infrastructures.

In November 2007, IBM launched the "Game Changing" "Blue Cloud" computing platform to provide customers with the use of the cloud computing platform. It includes a range of automated, self-management, and self-healing virtualization cloud computing software that enables applications from around the world to access distributed, large server pools. In August 2008, IBM announced it would invest about 400 million dollars for its cloud computing data center in North Carolina State and Tokyo, Japan. IBM plans to invest 300 million dollars in 10 countries to build 13 cloud computing centers in 2009.

Microsoft followed cloud computing and launched its Windows Azure operating system in October 2008. Azure (translated as "Blue Sky") is another disruptive transformation of Microsoft after Windows replaces DOS-by creating a new cloud computing platform on the Internet architecture that allows Windows to truly reach the "blue sky" from PCs. Microsoft has the world's billions of Windows user desktops and browsers, and now it connects them to the blue sky.

In China, the development of cloud computing is also very rapid. May 10, 2008, IBM in China Wuxi Taihu New Town Science and Education Industrial Park established China's first cloud computing center into operation. June 24, 2008, IBM in Beijing, IBM China Innovation Center set up a second China's cloud computing center IBM Greater China Region Cloud Computing Center; December 30, 2008, Alibaba Group's subsidiaries Ali Software and Jiangsu province Nanjing Municipal government formally signed a 2009-year strategic cooperation Framework Agreement, Planned in early 2009 in Nanjing to establish the first domestic "E-commerce Cloud Computing Center" for individuals and enterprises to carry out Internet cloud backup data security services and so on a series of Internet cloud computing services. April 9, 2009, "China Electronic Technology Annual Meeting" on the Cloud Computing Committee director Li DEII Academician published the "China Cloud Computing program and demonstration platform" implementation work started. May 22, 2009, China Electronic Society will hold the first China cloud computing conference in Beijing China Grand Hotel. China Mobile Research Institute to do cloud computing early start, has completed the Cloud Computing Center experiment. Mobile Chairman and CEO Wang Wang believes that cloud computing and Internet mobility is the future direction of development.

"Cloud computing" by the industry is considered to be the 2009 year's top six IT technology hot, at the same time by cloud storage derived from clouds, cloud security, cloud engine, cloud reasoning, cloud services, Cloud Entertainment, is now surging, colorful. Some are enthusiastic, some disdain, some confused, also can be described as some unpredictable. Whether the year of cloud computing is coming. What is "cloud computing"? What can be done, change what? Why are IT giants flocking? What will happen in the future? How will it affect our industry? Many problems are urgent to understand and imagine. Now on the author of the relevant knowledge to do a share of learning.

Two. Cloud computing process

Cloud computing is widely known to the public starting in October 2007. IBM and Google announced an American college education program that said the first 6 universities in the United States could use their cloud-based data Centers for remote research. Yahoo then announced a similar plan. Unlike the above education programs, IBM launched the Blue Cloud Program in Shanghai last November to industry clients such as financial institutions (blue Cloud), enabling financial institutions to perform complex computations at remote data centers and accelerate their response capabilities. In fact, Amazon has already opened cloud computing services to individuals and small business users. In March 2006, Amazon began leasing its redundant space to small and medium-sized enterprises to provide data storage services, and then gradually extended to a range of services such as computing, databases, etc. The most striking of all of these participants was Google and Microsoft. Google currently launched the cloud computing services include: Search, advertising, Apps. And Google Apps is through a series of acquisitions, Google offers a similar Microsoft Office suite of free office software. This forced Microsoft to release the network version of Office Live Workspace, the Office Office software.

In fact, cloud computing is not a new thing or a night of fame. As early as 25 years ago, Sun's chief technology officer put forward the "network is the computer" (the receptacle is the computer) propaganda language, earlier expressed the cloud computing mode of work: Decentralized personal computer management costs are high, maintenance, update and configuration are very inconvenient, With the development of the network, personal desktop computers can share the resources of computing power on the network.

More than 10 years later, software company Oracle CEO Larry. Ellison's launch of the network computer (receptacle Computer) to counterbalance Microsoft and Intel-led PCs is seen as a response to Sun's promotional language. But the plan was a No.

After that, many new concepts include: ubiquitous operations (ubiquitous computing), thin clients, network operating systems (WebOS), and Grid computing.

If Sun only paints the future, Google is turning it into reality today. Coincidentally, Google responsible CEO Ehrlichia. Schmidt worked as chief technology officer at Sun and was responsible for developing an internet strategy. Google's two founder's goal is to "comb the world's information to make it available globally," which coincides with how cloud computing works.

Three. Cloud computing concepts and features

1. Basic definition of cloud computing

Cloud computing (Cloud Computing) is defined as: A new business computing model, which distributes computing tasks to a pool of computer-composed resources, enabling applications to acquire computational power, storage space and various software services as needed.

The "cloud" here is a number of virtual computing resources that can be maintained and managed, typically for large server clusters, including compute servers, storage servers, broadband resources, and so on. Cloud computing centralizes all computing resources and is automatically managed by software without human involvement. This allows application providers to be more focused on their business, in favor of innovation and lower costs, without having to worry about tedious details.

One analogy: It's like switching from an old single generator to a centralized power supply model. It means that computing power can also be used as a commodity circulation, like gas, water and electricity, easy to use, low-cost. The biggest difference is that it is transmitted over the Internet.

Cloud computing is the development of parallel Computing (Parallel Computing), distributed Computing (distributed Computing) and Grid computing (grid Computing), or the business implementation of these computer science concepts. Cloud computing is the result of a hybrid evolution of virtualization (Virtualization), Utility Computing (Utility Computing), IaaS (infrastructure as a service), PaaS (Platform-as-service), SaaS (software, services), and so on.

As early as 2002, Dr. Peng, a high-performance grid research group at Tsinghua University, put forward the concept of computational pooling for the traditional grid computing ideas: "It connects the high-performance computers scattered around the world with high-speed networks, organically bonded with specially designed middleware software, The Web interface accepts the computing requests of scientists from all over the world and assigns them to the right node to run. The computing pool can greatly improve the service quality and utilization of resources, and avoid the inefficiency and complexity of dividing the application across nodes, and can meet the practical requirements under the current conditions. "If you change the" High-performance computer "into" Server cluster "and replace" science worker "with" business user ", it is very close to the current cloud computing.

2. Characteristics of cloud computing:

(1) Super scale. "Cloud" has a considerable scale, Google Cloud computing already has more than 1 million servers, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. "cloud" has hundreds of thousands of servers. Corporate private cloud typically has hundreds of thousands of servers. The cloud gives users unprecedented computing power.

(2) Virtualization. Cloud computing enables users to obtain application services in any location using a variety of terminals. The requested resource is from the cloud rather than the fixed physical entity. Applications run somewhere in the cloud, but in fact the user does not need to know or worry about where the application is running. Only need a laptop or a mobile phone, you can through the network services to achieve everything we need, even such as supercomputing tasks.

(3) High reliability. The cloud uses such measures as data duplication fault tolerance and computing node isomorphism to ensure high reliability of services, and using cloud computing is more reliable than using a local computer.

(4) universality. Cloud computing is not specific to the application, in the "cloud" under the support of the structure of the ever-changing applications, the same "cloud" can support the operation of different applications.

(5) High scalability. The scale of the cloud can be scaled dynamically to meet the needs of application and user-scale growth.

(6) on-demand service. "Cloud" is a huge pool of resources that you buy on demand; The cloud can be billed like running water, electricity and gas.

(7) Extremely inexpensive. Because the "cloud" of special fault Tolerant measures can use extremely inexpensive nodes to form the cloud, "Cloud's automated centralized management enables a large number of enterprises to not burden the increasingly high cost of data center management, the" cloud "of the universality of the resource utilization than the traditional system significantly increased, so users can fully enjoy the" cloud "low-cost advantage, It often takes hundreds of of dollars and a few days to complete a task that previously required tens of thousands of dollars and months to complete.

3. Several forms of cloud computing

The InfoWorld website has discussed several broad forms of cloud computing with dozens of companies, analysts, and it users:

(1). SAAS (software as a service). This type of cloud computing passes the program to thousands of users through the browser. This, in the eyes of the user, eliminates the expense of server and software authorization, and from a vendor standpoint, it is sufficient to maintain a single program, which can reduce costs. Salesforce.com is by far the most famous company for such services. SaaS is more commonly used in human resource management procedures and ERP. Google apps and Zoho office are similar services

(2). Practical calculation (Utility Computing). The idea was very early, but it was only recently that it was new in Amazon.com, Sun, IBM and other companies offering storage services and virtual servers. This cloud computing is the creation of a virtual datacenter for the IT industry that enables it to centralize memory, I/O devices, storage, and computing power as a virtual resource pool services for the entire network.

(3). Network services. Closely related to SaaS, network service providers are able to provide APIs that allow developers to develop more internet-based applications rather than providing stand-alone programs.

(4). Platform is service. Another kind of SaaS, this form of cloud computing provides the development environment as a service. You can use the middleman's device to develop your own program and upload it to users via the Internet and its servers.

(5). MSP (Management service provider). One of the oldest applications of cloud computing. This application is more for the IT industry rather than end users, often used for mail virus scanning, program monitoring and so on.

(6). Commercial Service platform. A mixed application of SaaS and MSP, a cloud that provides a platform for interaction between users and providers. For example, the user's personal expense management system can manage their expenses according to the user's setup and coordinate the various services they order.

(7). Internet integration. Integrate companies that provide similar services on the Internet so that users can compare and choose their own service providers more easily.

4. The historical original sin lurking under cloud computing

Cloud computing is not flawless. Amazon's web hosting service-Easy storage (simple Storage SERVICE,S3) failed in mid-February 2008, lasting about 4 hours. In addition to hearing complaints from customers, the incident has also begun to re-examine the security of the rampant cloud computing.

This is just one of the risks of cloud computing. The biggest concern is the privacy of cloud computing, where the most popular web-based business applications are payroll and customer account management, one of the most sensitive business messages. This kind of information disclosure event has happened more than once, and each time it is a massive data leak. Last year, American retailer TJX about 45 million user credit card numbers were stolen by hackers. The British government lost 25 million people's Social Security numbers and other information. Salesforce.com, an online software company, also lost 1 million users ' emails and phone numbers. This raises concerns among privacy experts. "Google will spark the most serious privacy problem in human history," said a Princeton expert. ”

Carr, the former executive editor of Harvard Business Review, described the less bright side of cloud computing in the new book Big Switch. He thinks that computers are both liberating technology and control technology. Especially when the system becomes more centralized, the personal data is exposed more and more, the control hand will prevail when data mining software becomes more and more professional. At this point, the system becomes the perfect machine for monitoring and manipulating humans.

Carl believes that Google will lead the search to artificial intelligence in order to achieve the best search results. In this full automatic search for artificial intelligence, users do not need to sit in front of the keyboard to search for information, when a problem in his mind, Google immediately through the phone to the search out the answer softly into the user's ear.

Karl concludes: "My concern is not that Google eventually made robots enslave humans, but it does create machines that can replace a part of human thinking, and when we start relying on these machines to remember and make decisions, you start to worry about our free will." "Cloud computing can be the greatest threat to intelligent intrusion in the absence of capacity and reliance, and full intelligence capability computing will be identified as a historical source of original sin, as in the case of the human Cologne project."

Four. Cloud computing applications and prospects

1. Quietly blooming cloud computing

Upload photos (or video) from your personal computer to a website for your friends to share; have an email address, its capacity according to your needs in the dynamic change; Keep friends and classmates in a Web site, each time the internet instead of turning out the paper book contact with them; Open text editing software, Write down a text and post it directly to your blog via the software. Understand what they are: Yahoo's photo-sharing site Flickr, Google's video-sharing website YouTube, email Gmail, social networking Facebook, Microsoft's blog writing software writer. Now all these network software, storage, security and other services are just a manifestation of cloud computing. Cloud computing is more through tens of millions of interconnected computers and servers for a large number of data operations, for search engines, financial industry modeling, medical simulation applications to provide supercomputing capabilities. For example, cloud computing can even provide 10 trillion of computing power per second, with such powerful computational power to simulate nuclear explosions, predict climate change and market trends.

Of course, here are some famous applications of cloud computing cloud: Amazon's cloud named Amazon Web Services (Amazon Web, called AWS), currently consists of 4 core services: Simple storage services (easy Storageservice, short S3) ; Elastic calculation Cloud (elastic Compute Cloud, short EC2). In other words, Amazon now offers access to storage, computer processing, information queuing, and database management systems that can be accessed through the network. Google launched the Google Apps engine (Google app, or Gae), a service that allows developers to compile Python based applications and use Google's infrastructure for free hosting. Salesforce is building its own network application platform force.com, a platform that can serve as the basis for other enterprises ' own software services. Force.com includes relational databases, user interface options, Enterprise logic, and an integrated development environment called APEX. Programmers can test the application software that they developed using apex on the platform's sandbox and then submit the completed code on the Salesforce AppExchange directory. Microsoft's grand plan is to "provide a balanced mix of enterprise-class software, partner hosting services, and cloud services." In short, Microsoft calls it "software Plus service" (software Plus services). Microsoft will launch the first batch of software services products including Dynamics CRM online, Exchange online, officecommunications online and Sharepointonline. Each product has a multiple customer share version, its main service target is small and medium-sized enterprises, for ordinary users, Microsoft's online services also include Windows Live, Office Live and Xbox Live.

2. The impact of cloud computing on the traditional IT world

For small businesses and entrepreneurs, cloud computing means huge business opportunities, and they can compete with big businesses on a higher level with cloud computing. Since Microsoft launched Office software in 1989, the way we've worked has changed dramatically, and cloud computing has brought in cloud offices--more computing power without the need to buy software and save local installations and maintenance. In a sense, cloud computing means the death of hardware. At the very least, those small and medium-sized enterprises, which are growing in demand, are no longer trying to buy expensive hardware, but renting computing power from cloud computing providers. While avoiding hardware investment, the company's technical departments do not have to worry about the hectic maintenance of technology and save time to do more business innovation.

With the rise of cloud computing, traditional hardware manufacturers are again facing a crisis. Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Sun, and so on for years have been worried about the U.S. market recession, perhaps the hardware market recession is really coming. Google CEO Ehrlichia Schmidt believes that cloud computing means returning to the mainframe era from the PC era. "In the PC era, PCs offer a lot of good features and apps, and now they're back in the big time," he said. Now the mainframe can't be seen or touched, but it really is there, in the clouds, in the sky. ”

3. Cloud computing for Communications operations

Cloud computing is an internet-based Super computing model, in remote data centers, thousands of computers and servers connected to a computer cloud, users through computers, notebooks, mobile phones and other means of access to the data center, according to their needs to operate. Generally speaking, the basic operation of communications to the "cloud" pipeline construction work, at the same time, at high speed, high quality, high safety factor, any place, any time, any way in any form with any person or any terminal information transmission to the traditional communication will also be likely to be subversive.

During the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mobile chairman and CEO Wang said two trends are noteworthy. One is the Internet's new technology applications, such as cloud computing technology, cloud computing technology products, so that the Internet capacity is greater, faster, and in turn, the cost is reduced, so the entire internet, it will produce an order of magnitude of the rise, this is the first unanimously recognized trend. The second is the Internet mobile, the mobile communication with the Internet, in this case, the development of technology is fast, the mode of operation must keep up, because the original telecommunications business model, and the Internet business model is not the same, now need to combine the two.

Individuals think that communications operations are an important part of cloud monitoring, like a certain degree of restrictions on the current freedom, equality and sharing of the Internet, as a key barrier to avoiding cloud computing risk. The basic communication network carries the cloud computing operation, the inevitable communication operator must actively intervene in the cloud computing development, the norm formulation, the construction, the maintenance, the commercial operation and so on the constructive work to go, this move has already counted the leading step in the domestic.

4. Cloud Computing Future applications

Future cloud computing provides almost unlimited space for storing and managing data, and provides almost unlimited computing power for all kinds of applications. Imagine when you're driving a car, as long as the mobile phone connected to the network, you can directly see the location of their own satellite map and real-time traffic conditions, you can quickly find their own preset route, you can ask the network friends recommend the best nearby scenic spots and restaurants, can quickly book the destination of the hotel, You can also share your photos or video clips you've just taken with friends from afar.

Leaving the cloud, we can't enjoy the convenience of using a PC or a client application on a mobile phone alone. PCs or other electronic devices are unlikely to provide unlimited storage space and computing power, but at the other end of the cloud, a huge cluster of thousands of, tens of thousands of, or more servers can easily do this. The capacity of individuals and individual devices is limited, but the potential of cloud computing is almost limitless. When you put the most commonly used data and most important features in the "cloud", we believe that your understanding of computers, applications and even the network will be a great change, your life will be changed.

Conclusion: Cloud computing is seen as the next revolution in technology, and it will fundamentally change the way it works and the business model. The spiritual essence of the Internet is freedom, equality and sharing. As one of the most embodiment of the internet spirit of the computing model, cloud computing will be in the near future to show a strong vitality, and will change from a number of aspects of our work and life. Whether it is an ordinary network user or a corporate employee, whether IT managers or software developers, they can experience this change firsthand.

Refer to the relevant website:

China Electronic Society cloud computing Expert Committee: http://bbs.chinaunix.net/yit/cloud.html

China Cloud computer network: http://www.cloudcomputing-china.cn/

China Cloud Computing: http://www.cncloudcomputing.com/

references edit this section back to the table of contents

http://www.yeeyan.com/articles/view/52383/20160

"Embracing the Beautiful network application model--Cloud computing" Author: kai-fu Lee

"Cloud Computing Development Status" author: Peng

"The world only needs 5 computers," Author: Ji

"Cloud computing and mobile communications who carry the future?" Author: knife Horse