Send in the Clouds
InfoManagement Direct, July 11, 2008
Of all varied the hype cycles I have witnessed since Y2K - including ERP, CRM, Supply Chain, BI, ECM, XML, Web services, SOA and many more that fell flat on their face - none has arisen with the rapidity and immediate reality of cloud computing.
As an evolutionary shift in infrastructure hosting and management, cloud computing supports contemporary trends that include software as a service (SaaS), application hosting, outsourcing and virtualization, which we’ll get to. Because things are progressing rapidly, forgive me for laying a little quick groundwork; for as many people I meet who are versed on the topic, I find many more in our industry who are unaware.
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Computing clouds are publicly available and virtually limitless grid of managed servers and/or storage that can be called on as needed, scaled up and down as needed and paid for as used. Yes, we’ve heard about this before. IBM launched its first On Demand utility computing center back in 2003 as a signature project of the Sam Palmisano regime, and the topic has been written about ever since. Some of us also remember the Web server farms of Exodus Communications or Global Crossing and how they were consumed in the dotcom bubble.
What’s changed over time is largely about shifting business priorities, but also about the huge performance improvements and lower cost of CPUs, the endless horizontal scalability of grid computing and a competitive market that is just beginning to commoditize infrastructure management.
What really upped the stakes were the huge clouds built by consumer-facing companies (including Google, Yahoo, e-Bay and Amazon) to run their own infrastructure. Once these guys got good at network computing (we’re talking really good), they realized they could resell it to you with a simple proposition: Why spend months and millions of dollars building and owning a data center when you can have the equivalent of a Fortune 500 analytic data store up and running in a matter of hours at a cost of thousands per month?
It’s compelling stuff, even if we are at the very front end of a nascent trend. I recently interviewed Vertica Systems CEO Ralph Breslauer for an upcoming issue of DM Review and will speak to one of his customers soon. Vertica sells analytic columnar databases to mainstream companies, has its share of blue-chip clients, and delivers its product in three ways. You can install it on your own hardware, you can buy an appliance that runs the software or you can pay as you go and scale up or down on a monthly basis on Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and S3 (Simple Storage Service).
This is not about selling books or music. Amazon has e-commerce services for business, but they separately know network computing like most IT departments never will. Amazon’s managed Web services are pretty much turnkey and come complete with service-level agreements, services for queueing, load balancing and failover across thousands or hundreds of thousands of common boxes. Need another 10 terabytes for your data warehouse? Don’t panic, just add a node on the cloud and you’re back in business in minutes.
Jeff Barr, Senior Web Services Evangelist at Amazon, said in a seminar that Amazon took its cue from outside developers who reported that 70 percent of the effort putting an application online had nothing to do with coding. “It was all this low-level muck,” he said, including the data center, bandwidth, power, cooling, operations, monitoring and staffing.
Being first to market with clients on the cloud (as Breslauer claims Vertica is), offers advantages from the ISV’s point of view. “We can get a proof of concept going in a half hour rather than wait for IT to procure hardware and set things up for you.” Some Vertica clients already see the cloud as a lower-risk proposition. For companies wanting to run a three-month marketing project, or for those who deal with seasonal spikes (taxes, audits, school systems, Christmas), there is no long-term agreement or leftover hardware to repurpose.
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