Jie: Clear cloud computing cognitive applications start with private cloud

Author: Machallian, senior Director of Cloud Computing Division, Asia Pacific.

Cloud computing is the most exciting and disruptive technology in the IT industry for 20 of years, and even more disruptive than the migration of large hosts to client/server architectures. Both the way IT services are delivered and the way businesses consume these IT services are changed by cloud computing. Chinese users are also quick to deal with the changes brought about by the new architecture, where I will share with you the thinking about cloud computing and how to define various types of cloud computing models.

What is cloud computing and what is not?

First, let's take a look at Gartner's definition of cloud computing: "Gartner believes that cloud computing is a computing method that allows flexible, scalable it capabilities to be delivered to external users via the Internet in a ' service ' format." ”

There are three keywords in this definition: scalability, services, and the Internet, so cloud computing is deployed and delivered on the Internet, and can be extended as needed. This article extends this definition because many enterprise users in China are deploying private clouds, and some enterprise users are deploying mixed clouds (they use both public and private cloud services in their data centers). ）

In short, cloud computing is not something that end users buy. In fact, end users should ignore and should not be concerned about whether the application uses cloud computing to deliver. Cloud computing is a new application architecture used by enterprises to reduce infrastructure costs, improve benefits, and solve capacity/scalability issues.

Here's a quiz to help determine if your business is deploying real cloud computing:

Can end users set up their own infrastructure services or applications without the help of IT staff?

are resources such as servers, storage, and networks considered as resource pools or as isolated entities?

are services and applications flexible? Can you expand and order automatically as needed?

Can you automatically track the usage of your infrastructure or applications? How much computing power does it cost? Can I track individual users or departments one by one?

After you know what cloud computing is, it's important to emphasize that cloud computing is not.

Cloud computing is not server virtualization. The two architectures are fundamentally different, and technically, running or supporting cloud computing does not require server virtualization (it will, of course, be helpful but not necessary).

Cloud computing does not lock vendors. Cloud computing should be open, and it should be able to work with any type of infrastructure based on customer needs, such as it should not perceive virtualization layers and be able to support different virtual machines such as vsphere, XenServer, ORACLE VMs, Hyperv, and KVM.

Cloud computing is not a place either. The cloud is a new architecture that is a new way to deliver IT services in a more flexible, efficient and economical way.

Three kinds of clouds in Jie

Jie focuses on three kinds of cloud, or what we call "3 PCs", the two key areas of enterprise: Mobile Office and cloud computing. Let's take a look at the difference between the three clouds and why they are important to most businesses in China today.

Personal cloud-for mobile office trends, people are connected to their desktops, applications, and data to enable people to collaborate at any location through any terminal device. In China, the number of mobile devices has exploded, with strong growth from smartphones to tablets and a growing trend of it consumerism, and the traditional "office" concept needs to be redefined.

Private cloud-A general designation of the enterprise's internal infrastructure, desktops, applications, and data, delivered on demand by IT personnel behind the enterprise firewall. Private cloud has a lot of advantages, flexible delivery services, providing services, can be refined to track usage, while allowing enterprises to their own infrastructure has a strong control, with higher security. One of Jie's users, Zynga, a social gaming company, now has the world's largest private cloud and billions of users.

Public cloud-An off-site multi-tenant infrastructure, storage and computing resources, and SaaS applications and data, typically provided by external service providers on demand. Many business users in the Asia-Pacific region, such as South Korea Telecom, Tata, IDC and Frontier, use Citrix technology to support their public cloud.

In addition, there is a fourth concept-"hybrid cloud", which refers to "cloud convergence", which is increasingly popular among enterprise users. A hybrid cloud is formed when private clouds are tightly integrated with the public cloud, giving it more flexibility to choose where to run the application, balancing costs and security. One reason for this convergence is that the cost of private cloud is gradually reduced and more flexible, while the public cloud is becoming more secure and transparent. Si Jie is focused and committed to providing the best solution for the combination of both, rather than a virtual infrastructure or cloud computing service provider.

Jie's vision is to place the Cloud Gateway (Cloud Gateway) as a single point of control at the front of the private cloud, unify the configuration, security management, and control of Windows applications, Web applications, SaaS applications, and mobile applications, and think of it as the backyards of all applications in the enterprise; at the back end of the private cloud, The Cloud Bridge (Yun Qiao) transparently connects to the public cloud service provider, giving the data center unlimited capacity; the third cloud-computing element that Jie focuses on is helping users build Amazon-style cloud platforms-from bare-metal to premium software services, such as cloud Orchestration (Cloudstack,cloudportal and XenServer) ultimately helps enterprise users solve their critical business problems and meet their needs for different applications.

Cloud Computing Application Scenario

The application of cloud computing is ubiquitous, and this focuses on private cloud.

Academic private cloud-provides computational resources for university researchers, professors, and students to make it easier and quicker for them and outside researchers/developers to access the resource clusters needed to serve their research work. More economical and efficient than "super computer". Both academic institutions and research-oriented enterprises have deployed such private clouds.

Development/Test Cloud-we have encountered the first application scenario that uses server virtualization to migrate to cloud computing. The development/testing cloud enables developers to build, upgrade, and test applications with unprecedented ease and lower cost and shorter cycles. Organizations want to allow developers and testers to access available and easily configurable resources, reducing the time required to purchase and build infrastructure (servers, storage, and networks), and to install software, which took about 6 weeks.

Online gaming, social media, WEB 2.0 dedicated cloud-building an Amazon-style cloud platform behind a firewall that allows for greater control and security while enjoying flexibility and scale. Many companies choose a "hybrid cloud" that can connect to the public cloud when needed to achieve unlimited flexibility, as the Zynga cloud platform mentioned earlier is an innovation case.

DaaS (WaaS) dedicated cloud-Enterprise users use cloud computing, delivering Windows desktops in the form of services to achieve greater efficiency and greater control.

BYO mobile services-whether banking or employee portals, cloud computing is a very good architecture that facilitates the application of internal or external customer delivery (allowing for expansion based on demand or growth).

Disaster recovery and business continuity services-today's world environment is increasingly unpredictable, and political and environmental events are frequent. Cloud computing has become an important model for disaster recovery, not only to establish a fault backup point, but also to maintain the "Pay-as-you-go" service advantage, so that enterprises can respond more quickly to business opportunities, while ensuring high returns.

In addition, the cloud infrastructure can help address changes in different industries. Some changes are due to the characteristics of the industry, such as the retail industry in the holiday sales season will be the rapid development of sales. Of course, industry changes vary, some are cyclical, predictable, such as the World Cup or the Olympics, and some are unpredictable, such as important news events or blog sites. In this case, the infrastructure needs to be built for the expected peak. In peacetime, most of these capacities are idle, and cloud computing can make these already deployed infrastructure more profitable.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)