Cloud Computing
Oct. 6, 2008 by ravishan
Cloud computing refers to the idea of computing happening out in the “cloud”, which refers to the internet. Increasing availability of faster network connections and most importantly, the affordability of the bandwidth would mean that for certain selected applications, having them run elsewhere on the cloud can be very attractive. Amazon popularized this concept because they found that they needed a lot of hardware to assure the highest quality of service that is expected of them, but only about 10% of the resources were getting used at any given time. They needed the resources to prepare for the spikes, but on average they didn’t need them all at all times. We have similar experience on our servers – we need to prepare for peak activities, but peaks tend to be cyclical and rare.
We need to be on top of this technology to look for opportunities if and when they arise.
One of the major advantages of the cloud computing is that one does not have to worry about locally managing a data center – you don’t have to provision new computers, no need to worry about redundancy, hardware maintenance, uptime, and the environmental preparation such as air conditioner (and redundancy for that). However, cloud computing comes at a cost and a careful analysis of what it would cost to host a set of services elsewhere vs locally need to be done. In addition, we need to carefully assess the security assurances that we receive for the data stored on their servers, and possibly increase the network bandwidth to accommodate the access from on campus to the internet.
The attractive thing about the cloud computing model pricing is that you pay for only the resources you consume. They have a metric that is typically based on the amount of memory your application requires and the CPU time that it consumes. For example, Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) charges 10 cents 1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform. You can view other charges here.
GoGrid.com is another such service which will provide you with a virtualized environment for Windows as well as Linux operating systems.
Thankfully, the technology has matured enough that many of these issues have been addressed or is being addressed. My question to the readers is, do you think there are services that we offer which would lend itself to using this type of facility?