How to solve the problem of application porting in cloud computing

Interop conference Speakers said in Wednesday that cloud computing networks are still isolated from each other. Whether it's a cloud service transfer to another cloud computing service, or an internal data center transfer to a cloud provider is hard to achieve. The progress of standard and uniform formats will eventually allow for certain portability.

Randy Rowland, Terremark senior vice president for product development, said it was heartening that we might see a software product that could easily shift the workload from the inside to the outside cloud in the year. ' We will ensure that if there is an emergency, they can move the cloud-based workload back to the enterprise's data center, ' he said.

Rowland says people are worried about being locked up. Unfortunately there are some network obstacles, such as finding an easy way to change the IP address.

But the fear of portability will be solved, said Simon Crosby, chief technology officer. Manufacturers know they're going to do it.

Bitcurrent founder Alistair Croll said Amazon's popular EC2 cloud computing services are proprietary technologies that are hard to mirror to corporate networks.

However, Croll noted that some progress had been made, such as the Open virtualization standard. He says this standard will make working without relying on hypervisor, allowing interoperability of multiple virtualization platforms.

Virtualization has improved the portability of server-based workloads, according to Crosby. However, earlier versions of the IaaS (infrastructure, services) cloud computing products are weak on the web. A new approach to abstract network resources is necessary to improve portability.

Another speaker, IBM chief Technology officer Kristof Kloeckner, said in an interview that it was easy to migrate workloads between internal data centers and cloud computing. However, there are problems with applications that need to migrate large amounts of data into cloud computing.

Kloeckner says there are many demonstrations of migrating applications between different cloud computing networks. However, these demo applications are small and do not carry much data.

Grid-based applications, a variety of simulations, and just a seasonally run workload may be a good candidate for migrating to cloud computing services, Kloeckner said.

' Cloud computing will be integrated with each other, ' Kloeckner said in a speech. Cloud computing will remain open. That's an important part of our agenda. I think what's going to happen here is a fundamental shift in creating a more flexible deployment of an IT-based service approach.

Croll says there are basically three types of applications in the future. A similar is always running within the enterprise data center; the second type can be run internally or run in the cloud, and it can be hosted in the cloud if it has financial implications; A third type always runs in the cloud, perhaps because an application needs to be exposed to a partner.

There is still no simple answer to the question of whether an enterprise should migrate existing applications to external cloud-based services. The Speaker of the Interop conference suggested that customers are willing to put new applications in the cloud, but they are unsure whether the effort and expense of migrating existing applications is worthwhile.