Introduction By
Endeavors to optimize efficiency of IT organization has come a long way in the last few
decades. From ‘initial arena of Mainframes and its time sharing model’ to ‘the PCs with
volumes of comparatively less expensive computing servers’ to ‘Application Service
Prasanna
Provider (ASP) reducing the operational cost’ to ‘service-focused models of SaaS and Pachwadkar
SOA providing reusability, economies of scale’. The latest trend in this evolution is Business Analysis and
‘Cloud Computing’, promising to revolutionalize the world of computing. Gartner Incubation Cell
recently commented, “Worldwide software spending is on pace for the strongest growth
rate in 2008 at more than 10. However, the replacement of systems does not prasanna.pachwadkar@patni.com
automatically equate to new software market growth. SaaS/Cloud Computing,
SOA/Web 2.0, and open source software are causing huge changes to the software
market. Many of these factors are impacting market growth as enterprises replace
assets with per-use services." Sunil Joglekar
Product and Technology
This article attempts to understand the substance behind this hype with a discussion on Initiatives
what is Cloud Computing, players in this space, and probable ways this new trend
could take shape. sunil.joglekar@patni.com
Even though Cloud Computing has started taking shape in very recent years; few
people like John McCarthy, the revolutionary computer scientist had envisioned this
future while commenting that "computation may someday be organized as a public
utility".
What it is?
Wikipedia defines the term as “a style of computing where IT-related capabilities are
provided “as a service”, allowing users to access technology-enabled services "in the
cloud" without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology
infrastructure that supports them.”
Gartner defines Cloud Computing as "a style of computing where massively scalable
IT-enabled capabilities are delivered 'as a service' to external customers using Internet
technologies."
Cloud Computing
Innovate to Survive
The companies like Google, Hotmail and Yahoo sustained through the dotcom burst.
They began innovating further to attract more number of users. Cloud Computing has
its roots in the strategies adopted by these internet giants.
Most of these internet companies would face unpredictable demand due to the very
nature of their operations. Also, these companies would need to respond to strong
fluctuations in the demand due to factors such as seasonality. These vendors needed
to ensure optimum response time even at the highest hit-rate. To achieve this, these
vendors went on expanding their infrastructural capacity. But, this expansion would
obviously be constrained by capital availability and would need to optimize utilization of
the infrastructure during high and low demand periods.
Generalize to Proliferate
In the Internet era, it is taking much lesser time for the generalization of an innovation.
In early days of computing evolution, technology companies such as IBM used to
provide newer technologies, secure its intellectual property rights and sell it at a
premium. On the contrary, many of the innovative technology approaches in the recent
times have come from the business enterprises such as Google and Amazon who have
innovated technologies for their business use. And as soon as they would be
successful, they would bundle it and would make it available to the other users at an
affordable price.
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Cloud Computing
Once these internet evangelists were successful in managing a flexible, scalable and
optimized infrastructure for their own businesses, they started looking at other ways to
further optimize the resources. ‘Services’ was already the buzzword in the IT industry.
Taking the hint, these companies started carving out reusable and generic components
of their application infrastructure and began offering those as services in the ‘cloud’ i.e.
over the internet.
Amazon AWS could be seen as one prominent example of this evolution as well as
leader of today’s Cloud Computing market place.
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Cloud Computing
(Webex) are the prominent areas where the vendors are offering solutions. Some
players have even started offering BPM (Appian) and (NetSuite, SAP) ERP in services
model.
IBM Blue Cloud somewhat different strategy in terms of Cloud computing services. It
focuses on Cloud Computing within firewalls of an enterprise. IBM Blue Cloud could
link together enterprise computers to allow corporate data centers to operate more like
the Internet or cloud. So, large enterprises could get Cloud Computing services using
this internal cloud. Other vendors in this category are Joyent, GoGrid, and SunGrid.
Some vendors such as OpSource, JamCracker and RackSpace focus only on hosting
services whereas another subcategory of vendors focuses only on deployment
services. These vendors specializes in packaging and virtualization format solutions for
provisioning applications into a cloud (RPath, VMWare) or provide solutions focused on
the coordination of many virtual appliances (app, DB, network) in the cloud to form a
full deployment (3Tera AppLogic).
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Cloud Computing
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Cloud Computing
Today, an ISV could build a business application for ‘provisioning in the cloud’ using
the BungeeLabs ‘application development services in the cloud’ with underlying
‘application deployment and hosting services in the cloud’ from Amazon AWS.
Apart from smaller ISVs, IT departments of enterprises could very well use Cloud
Computing services. Unlike the traditional licensed, in-house IT, for Cloud Computing
services, IT departments do not need to invest heavily in new IT infrastructure just for a
pilot project. Also, some projects would experience temporary surges in need of
computing capacity where purchasing additional IT infrastructure would not prove
economical. Fetching Cloud Computing services as and when required could be much
cost-effective and timely solution.
New York Times Co. and the Nasdaq stock exchange are prominent examples of
successful fulfillment of these promises. These organizations have adopted Amazon
AWS Cloud Computing services for business critical areas.
Approach:
Nature of Project:
Temporary but data-intensive project Huge investments in the infrastructure were not justifiable.
Decided to use Amazon AWS services.
Scanned in the stories, then uploaded those to S3, taking 4TB of
Objective:
space
To convert 11 million articles published
from the newspaper's founding in 1851 Using Amazon.com's EC2 computing platform, a PDF conversion
through 1989, to make them available application was run that converted that 4TB of TIFF data into 1.5TB of
through its Web site search engine PDF files.
Using 100 Linux computers, the job took about 24 hours, costing
around $240.
Infrastructure Requirements: Using existing infrastructure at the company, it would have taken a
Data storage and data conversion month.
required massive 4TB space and huge
computing capacity. No prior coordination with Amazon: IT department just signed up for
the service on the Web using a credit card then began uploading the
data.
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Cloud Computing
Along with these major enterprises, even small ISVs and innovators are also making
effective use of Cloud Computing services for launching their business/ consumer
applications. In fact, these applications could not have been feasible to launch and
successfully run if it was not for Cloud Computing services.
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Cloud Computing
Turnaround
Time Rapid SDLC
time
Business
Resources Scalability Utilization Agility
Quick Turnaround
User organizations could design architecture of their IT systems in such a way that they
could run processing on parallel computing resources Cloud Computing service
providers. Rapid provisioning and de-provisioning of Cloud Computing resources thus
assures increase in productivity and reduction in turnaround time.
Increased Utilization
Cloud Computing service providers aggregates the demand from various user
organizations so as to dynamically allocate the computing resources using
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Cloud Computing
Our Take
Cloud Computing is a sun-rise area of technology. Besides, Cloud Computing includes
many pieces such as computing, storage, messaging, integration et al. The full benefits
would be realized as further progress is made. Multiple new vendors as well as existing
internet/ enterprise giants are eyeing for a strong foothold in this market. Looking at
the investments being made by leaders such as IBM, Google and Amazon, it is quite
evident that the adoption of Cloud Computing is on the rising trend. Though, the market
is very much nascent at this stage. Various vendors as well as analysts are trying to
define the shape and size of this market in multiple ways. Market-maps are getting
modified with the enhancements of the existing products/ technologies as well as new
addition of vendors. This hyped enthusiasm is creating contradictory, confusing
folksonomy. Lack of standards, issues related to data ownership and compliance would
need to be addressed with innovative approaches. It would be some time until the
Cloud Computing market gets better defined, players get well positioned and the
potential issues get appropriately addressed.
Cloud Computing is changing the way IT industry would operate. It could open up
various possibilities as well as new set of challenges for user organizations as well as
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Cloud Computing
IT service providers. User organizations are already set in the exploration mode. They
could increasingly ask for Cloud Computing services like Amazon AWS as against
investing heavily in the in-house infrastructure. IT service providers need to build
competencies to be able to build or deploy applications in the cloud on such platforms.
Developing, deploying and maintaining the business application outside the four walls
of an enterprise could lead to new service offerings in system integration domain. Patni
has already begun researching and experimentations in Cloud Computing space, along
with few PoCs (proof of concept). Patni would also be evaluating the market on an
ongoing basis as the Cloud Computing evolves in days to come.
References
• Understanding the Cloud Computing/ SaaS/ PaaS markets - Peter Laird, Oracle
(BEA)