soa+ Virtualization +saas Cloud computing is big

Cloud computing (Cloud Computing) is becoming a technical jargon or even a code word. Not only are big companies such as Google, IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo, the cloud fans, but smaller companies are moving closer. CRM software online service provider Salesforce.com began to call itself the cloud computing application, which was previously positioned as the SaaS (software as a service) model of "replacing traditional software delivery"; Facebook simply claims to be a cloud-computing platform where developers can develop applications on the platform and distribute them on the platform.

"Really, we don't create storage, database, computer, or database functions, but provide a more economical way to process data." "said Andy Jessi, senior vice president of Amazon Network services. Founded in 2006, his department is a pioneer in cloud computing infrastructure service providers, and the New York Times uses the "Flexible Computing Cloud" (Elastic Compute Cloud) service to provide the newspaper version from 1851 to 1922 on the Internet.

In short, cloud computing means that computing resources are acquired, processed, stored, delivered, and databases are from four of the company's own walls, and users simply pay for the portion of the resources they use. In the past few years, this computing pattern has also been called grid (NET) or utility computing (UtilITy Computing)-access it when it is needed, like using a power network or running water, and paying only for the part that is used. At the same time, its application marginal successfully expands to the domain of SOA, virtualization, SaaS, Network Service and so on.

The Almighty cloud?

Just as the MP3 player kills CDs, cloud computing will inevitably break the old computing model and trigger an "omnipotent" fervent fantasy: with high-speed Internet access, near-limitless storage space, and the ability to assemble, what else can't do?

Within a day of June 24, IBM also set up two cloud computing centers in Johannesburg, China and South Africa. At the end of the year, IBM plans to build at least 10 cloud computing centers around the world.　IBM has dubbed its own idea "blue Cloud", with at least 200 researchers focused on cloud computing. "As time goes by, some old things appear in new faces." Nickolas Donofrio, IBM Global Innovation and Technology executive vice president, lamented. In recent years, IBM has done a lot in the efficient operation of data centers, such as Grid computing, which centralizes desktops and other devices, and users extend computing across many machines and make programming simpler. With the network bandwidth and virtualization technology far beyond the current year, the grid technology has been carried forward with the help of cloud computing. "In a sense, cloud computing is a natural development of grid computing models," he said. "What's different, says Frank Gens, an IDC analyst, is that Google's programming model and its true openness--ordinary people can also write apps, without having to be PhD at Stanford or Carnegie Mellon University. ”

A vivid example of the charm of cloud computing comes from Animoto, a company founded in New York, which is only 18 months old, allowing customers to upload their pictures and music and provide automatic generation of customized web-based video display services that people can share with their friends, This service is used by about 5,000 visitors a day.

In mid-April this year, Facebook users ' interest in the app came to a small climax, with about 750,000 people registering on Animoto in three days. At peak hours, about 25,000 people use Animoto services every hour.

To fill the server's demand gap, the company needs to expand its server capacity 100 times times on its existing base. But the founders did not have the money to scale server expansion, or to manage the servers with technical capabilities and interest.

So they started working with rightscale-, a cloud computing service provider based in Santa Barbara, California, which designed apps for Amazon's cloud computing. With this collaboration, Animoto only needs to pay for a three-day surge in traffic and does not need to buy or configure any new servers. It takes the load to Amazon, a server that costs about 10 cents an hour, and includes some marginal cost of bandwidth, storage, and related services. When server demand drops, Animoto automatically lowers their server usage and lowers their bills.

The combination of rapid response capabilities and new sales and marketing channels like Facebook causes software companies to have a strong interest in cloud computing. This is even true for companies that are not in the software industry-traditional companies are also changing their computer architecture to use cloud computing.

"In fact, cloud computing plays a role in technology as the power network does for power applications," Nick Carr, the former executive editor of Harvard Business Review, compared cloud computing and power Networks in his new book, The Big Switch. The power network has improved the company's operations, and when every home has cheap energy and access, "there is incredible creativity to take advantage of these cheap energy," Carr said. He thinks cloud computing will also lead to a similar cycle in the next 10 years with power networks.

Safe in the Cloud

In theory, cloud computing's powerful data operations and synchronous scheduling capabilities can greatly enhance the responsiveness of security companies to new threats, while at the same time distributing patches or security policies to branch nodes.

Oscar, global vice president of Trend Technology and executive director of Greater China, said the trend has been to focus on cloud computing models as early as three years ago, exploring how to put the increasingly large database of clients on the cloud.

For traditional anti-virus vendors, the introduction of cloud computing can greatly enhance their ability to collect virus samples, reduce the threat response time. Trend technology, rising has played a "security cloud" calculation slogan, network security vendors Websense in the malicious code collection and emergency response has taken full advantage of the characteristics of cloud computing, its global deployment of honeypot and grid computing close combination, you can in time to respond to the network constantly emerging new attacks, Provides strong support for the timely updating of its rule base.

The premise of implementing secure cloud computing is to collect users ' security threats quickly and efficiently. Through the implementation of cloud computing data analysis, to respond to user security requirements. So how to quickly and accurately collect user's exception information, becomes the security cloud computing implementation first difficulty.

Trend technology uses a global network of threat information to intercept web threats before they reach the network or computer. Almost all security vendors, including Microsoft, have been tracking the use of terminal equipment in real time.

At the same time, in order to facilitate more accurate and rapid access to information, Symantec, Trends and other manufacturers set up a dedicated "honeypot system" to widely collect the attacks in the network, "Honeypot + Grid Computing" architecture is considered a simple implementation of cloud computing.

Cloud computing is a system pool that is highly scalable and manageable and capable of computing infrastructure for end-user application software, according to Forrester's analyst. But if the infrastructure of each cloud is unique, and if the infrastructure is to apply virtualization technology, how to address license licensing becomes a problem to consider when implementing cloud computing. At the same time, it is necessary to solve the real problems such as access rights, data storage and data isolation of cloud computing privileged users.

Market research firm Gartner says security software will shift from PC endpoints to cloud computing. Over the next five years, the proportion of malicious software and spam detection revenue in cloud-based e-mail and instant messaging will increase from 20% to 60% of the total message security revenue.

Security company Symantec has also predicted the shift, with home users and corporate users moving from installing security software on a single computer to accessing security services online via a remote computer. Symantec says companies are already using proxy security servers to reduce the impact of security software on performance.

Cloud based proxy computers can provide security services that were previously performed locally, such as mandatory identification, data loss, intrusion detection, network access control, and security vulnerability management.

Gartner analyst Kelly Kavanagh says the ability to deliver large, scalable processing, storage, and bandwidth in cloud computing will require new ways and new service providers to provide security control and functionality to users.

Cloud worries

However, some practical problems may still turn the cloud into rain.

Carr also paints a less bright side of cloud computing in the big shift. He thinks calculators are both liberating and controlled technology. Especially when the system becomes more centralized, the personal data is exposed more and more, when the data mining software becomes more and more professional, the control hand will prevail, and the system will become the perfect machine for monitoring and manipulating human beings.

Google's privacy policy stipulates that it will share data with the government if it has to provide relevant data to meet "any applicable laws, regulations, legal procedures, or enforcement government requirements" if the company "kindly justifies". Scott Petry, Google's product management director, said: "When we treat our customers ' data, we have more audit and regulatory efforts than many customers themselves." But if we receive a subpoena, we will act according to the law. He added that in some cases subpoenas could be "confidential", that is to say, Google could follow the law without informing users of their data to be provided to the Government.

"The limitations of using cloud computing are a sensitive issue that companies have to take seriously, and companies must measure the risks that cloud computing will have when and where it works," says David Cearley, vice president and analyst at Gartner Consulting. "By reducing the control of some data to save economic costs, it means that it is possible to store sensitive business data, such as corporate information and customer information, in the hands of cloud service providers, and it is important for information managers to choose whether such transactions are worth making."

The recent series of significant network failures has raised real concerns about the reliability of cloud computing. In February and July of this year, Amazon's "Simple Storage Services" (Simply Storage service, short S3) two outages, resulting in a network of single storage services to the Web site was paralyzed. Amazon explains that service outages are the result of an increase in the number of authentication requests, and that the S3 problem prevents new virtual machines from registering on the computing cloud so that some virtual machines fail to start. For these in the start-up period, the company's users stickiness is not small enterprises, the loss of the site paralysis is very easy to shake their confidence.