Experts: Five views on cloud computing

Experts: Five Views on cloud computing (1)

Cloud computing, like every it trend, includes service-oriented architectures (SOA) and Web services. We're talking about cloud computing, and

I recently joined a linkedin/google group on cloud computing, one of which has posted a sticker that looks so simple. The question is: what is the difference between cloud computing and what we know about grid computing? I certainly have my own answer to this question, but throughout the night there were a lot of respondents pouring in and creating an e-mail chain that provided some nuances about the term.

I hope that I will not be excluded from the organization, but I think some of them are very interesting and can be taken up for consideration. For privacy reasons, I'm not going to attach anyone's name, and I'll rearrange some of the ideas, mainly to make it clearer and more appropriate for the length of the article. Here are five key ideas about cloud computing:

1. Manufacturers always confuse the definition of new words.

In my opinion and others, cloud computing is different from utility computing, and it's not the same as grid computing.

Grid computing usually refers to a resource pool environment for computing tasks, such as image processing, rather than long-running processes (such as a Web site or mail server).

Utility computing usually refers to a resource pool environment for mastering long running processes, and tends to focus on satisfying service levels by optimizing a certain amount of necessary resources.

Cloud Computing In many cases refers to the different kinds of services available on the Web, which can be provided on the computing capabilities of the service provider's architecture (such as Google's apps or Amazon EC2 or salesforce.com). A cloud computing environment can run in a grid computing environment, or in a utility computing environment, but not for users who are being serviced.

2. Cloud computing = Grid Computing

The workload is sent to the IT architecture that contains the assigned host and work from the node. Those hosts control which resources are allocated to these workloads (how many are running parallel workloads from the nodes). This is completely transparent to the customer and the user simply sees that the workload is assigned to the cloud/grid and the results are returned to them. And from the node can be, of course, can not be a virtual host.

Cloud computing = Software as a service. This is a Google Apps model, and apps is in the cloud, like some parts of the web.

Cloud computing = Platform as a service. This is the model of Amazon EC2 et al, in which an external entity maintains the IT Architecture (master/from) and the customer buys time/resources on the architecture. This is in the cloud, spanning the web, outside of the company that rents those services.

3. Cloud computing is the transfer of local services to the Web

Transfer locally stored files to a secure, extensible environment. Move from applications that are limited to disk space to applications that do not have a space limit, from using Microsoft Office to using web-based office. Between 2005 and 2008, online storage became cheaper and online storage was more secure than local storage or storage on your own server. This is cloud computing. It includes grid computing, large databases such as bigtable, caching, always accessible, fail-recovery, redundancy, scalability, and other factors. It can be seen as a step further into the Internet. It also contains a large number of associations, such as the contrast between static and dynamic, RDBMS and bigtable, and flat data views. The overall business structure that relies on it architecture will change, and programmers will drive the entire cloud and eventually generate a lot of programmers. It's like a transition from mainframe to personal computers. Now you have a personal space on the cloud.

This is very interesting, like Web 2.0. But there are a lot of changes. The market is all around the whole technology upgrade.

Experts: Five Views on cloud computing (2)

4. The two concepts of grid and cloud are not exclusive

Our clients look at it this way:

Cloud computing is a kind of payment for the use of resources (for example, you don't have to have resources).

You can use the cloud without the grid, or vice versa. You can also use a grid on a cloud.

5. In general, I will divide the concept of cloud computing into the following three camps:

Enabling people-these companies can enable potential architectures or basic modules. These companies focus primarily on data center Automation and server virtualization (Vmware/emc,citrix,blade Logic,redhat,intel, sun,ibm,enomalism, and so on).

Provider--(Amazon Web services,rackspace,google, Microsoft). These companies have budgets and know how to build a global computing environment, which typically costs millions of or even billions of of dollars. Cloud providers often provide their architecture or platform. Typically, these services are provided in a paid manner and are used based on utility.

Customers--at the other end of the cloud, we see some client companies. They build or upgrade Web applications over existing cloud computing environments, and do not need to invest in data centers or any physical facilities. Often providers and clients are companies such as Amazon (SQS,SDB, etc.) and Google (Apps) and Salesfore (Force). But they can also start over, providing tools and services on cloud computing (cloud Management).

"Cloud customers are usually a relatively broad organization, including those that are available through web-based services, such as webmail, blogs, networks, and so on." From a customer's point of view, cloud computing has become a platform for you to create, lead, and deploy an extensible Web application.

At least for now, our concept of cloud computing is clearer.