What the Heck Is Cloud Computing?
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The most profound impact of cloud computing is the fact that it is forcing companies to change their business models.
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“Cloud computing” has replaced Web 2.0 as the IT world’s newest buzzword. Thanks to the potential unlocked by virtualization technology and vast investments from major players, cloud computing is poised to lead the next re-visualization of the Internet. Its influence lies in giving huge amounts of processing power to small, portable devices by crunching data and serving software from the cloud. Soon, all important documents, data and email will be saved on avirtual server, which will allow users to access that information from any location.*
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This shift has come in the form of SaaS (software-as-a-service) instead of the soon-to-be-outdated model, SaaP (software-as-a-product). No longer will you need to buy a copy of Microsoft Office off the shelf (unless Microsoft can convince you otherwise), because the cloud will be able to support programs that were installed on hard drives at a considerable price.
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The Cloud Players
Google: Late last year, The New York Times reported that Google had partnered with IBM to promote cloud research by building a cloud dedicated to educating the next generation of developers. The two companies have pledged $30 million over two years for the project, which will serve six major universities in the country.
While cloud computing might be a new concept, Google has been publicizing its activity for years. The company likely invented the term itself. “We call it cloud computing,” said Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Already, Google offers many small-scale, Web-based cloud-computing services. With Google Calendar, Picasa, YouTube, Gmail and Google Docs, you can store most important data on your computer online and access it from home, work or your phone. But The Wall Street Journal has predicted Google will take this initiative one step further by allowing users to save their entire hard drives on Google’s cloud.
Amazon.com: The bookseller’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) shows just how far the online retailer has diversified its holdings, moving into areas formerly held by IBM, Google and hardware makers. With Amazon S3, a developer can store an unlimited number of “objects” of up to 5GB each into a “bucket” located in America or Europe. This allows developers to store and share vast amounts of information.
Amazon.com’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is the cloud-computing partner to the S3 storage service. With EC2, Amazon.com can offer developers near-instant scalability. EC2 is already generating its own boutique industry with Morph eXchange, who provides an intermediate service allowing developers to design and launch Web applications without directly dealing with the cloud.
In late 2007, The New York Times employed S3 and EC2 to generate PDFs of more than 11 million newspaper stories from 1851 to 1922. The raw information was more than 4TB, but once loaded into S3, the automated conversion of all 11 million PDFs took only one day and generated an additional 1.4TB of data.
Apple Inc.: Focusing recently on its iPhone, iPod and MacBook Air product lines, Apple has let its nascent cloud-storage system, .Mac, gather some dust. Offering 1GB of storage for $100 per year is “laughable” when you can get double that for nothing.
An Apple/Google partnership in the cloud would solve this problem. The two companies released of the iPhone would demonstrate how the iPhone and the cloud can work together.
Microsoft Corp.: Microsoft’s current cloud offering, Windows Live, is not getting high marks. Stacey Higginbotham described it as “less a cloud strategy than a layer of fog over the multibillion-dollar packaged-software franchises that keeps Microsoft going.”
source: Jim Higdon on May 20, 2009
Summary:
Cloud computing comes into focus only when you think about what IT always needs: a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends IT’s existing capabilities.
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