31 Jul, 2008

Cloud Computing - a laymans guide

Today we had an article in the BBC News - HP Intel, Yahoo in cloud Tie-up. Cloud

computing is coming of age, and the research firm Gartner has dubbed it as influential

as e-business. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7531352.stm

To the average Joe, a computer is the box on the desk that allows them to write and

print documents, send and receive emails, explore the internet, and play games, so

what exactly do we mean by "Cloud Computing", where does "Software As A

Service" - SaaS fit in, and what is "the grid" or "distributed computing".

Some really clever people twenty years ago realised that for the majority of the time,

your computer on your desk is actually doing very little, it is idling, and that if some

way could be found of combining all this unused computing horse-power to some use,

a very powerful resource or virtual super-computer could result. From this concept

was born the first "grids" of computers, from the likes of IBM, where multiple arrays

of computers were first arranged on a network to work on complex problems in a

parallel fashion. These tools evolved into "grids" whereby all the PC's in a company

could be left on overnight, running a special program that would allow them to share

the massive computing jobs associated with modeling the real world, or animation

graphics for motion pictures or financial calculations of modeling the business

markets.

Commercial and academic girds of computers were soon setup this way, whereby you

could buy time in which to run your complex calculation projects, and some of these

grids are now available as specialised resources via the internet.

Perhaps the biggest distributed computer project people may have heard of, is the

"Seti @ Home" project. The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence array of radio

telescopes began producing far too much data for any single computer to analyse by

the time it would take for the sun to stop burning. By "donating" their spare computer

time, enthusiasts on the internet downloaded a simple processing tool, which would

then automatically download chunks of data, and upload results to break up the huge

job of data analysis, into hundreds of thousands of little bits being processed on

hundreds of thousands of computers around the world - and the task became

manageable within a lifetime. Soon followed more complex "distributed processing"

tools which searched for proteins to aid a cure for cancer, and modeled the earth's

climate to check predictions of global warming.

The concept of the "cloud" started in the early days of the internet, where people

would shorthand the entire internet as a "cloud" of other computers and servers sitting

somewhere etherial - (hence the ethernet). All that "cloud computing" refers to, is the

concept of utilising all the processing power of computers and servers available on

then internet to do your work - and not be limited by the memory and processor of

the machine on your desk. And now into this arena comes the concept of Software As

A Service - programs that you don't buy on a CD-Rom and install on your computer,

but which you run through your web-browser. They are in essence a form of

distributed / grid computing, but they differ in some small and rather important ways.

Software as a service, is just that - a service. You usually pay for the service via a

monthly/annual rental, and expect results, updates, reliability, data backup, security.

Previous "distributed" computing models relied on redundancy due to the availability

of computers being on a casual basis (such as the Seti @ Home) - data was

simultaneously sent to several computers, and should one of these computers fail, the

results were still available from one of its partners. In software as a service, you may

have multiple computers providing the service, but they are guaranteed, backed up,

securely located with redundancy in case of disaster, and running 24x7 and not

haphazardly available for the job.

Software as a service provides you with some specific tools - such as Customer

Relationship Management (salesforce.com), such as Document Management and

Sharing (wikidot, socialtext), such as communications via discussion boards and

blogs (blogger, wordpress), document creation itself (google apps) or even, secure

data storage of backup data (logmein backup) . More importantly though, it provides

you with something much more valuable, independence from your desktop PC. Being

that the software is available "online", it is theoretically available from any web-

browser, on any machine (mobile phone/laptop/internet café), any where in the world.

For people on the move who want to access everything for their business, having your

tools supplied via the net is really the only way to go.

Suffice to say, that since this information is shared over the internet, anyone in your

organization can access these tools anywhere as well. It is quite feasible to run

companies whereby their employee's and suppliers are distributed not just over the

country, but all over the world. Access is handled via username password, or even via

encryption tokens depending on the level of security required. I know how well this

all works - I set this up for my own disparate company with employees now on both

sides of the planet over multiple locations and time-zones. (And other SaaS such as

Skype/DimDim for VOIP and video conferencing and LogmeIn for computer control

are the final pieces of that jigsaw).

The next real advantage, is that suddenly you no-longer need specialized IT expertise

in you organization, or specialist software installed on expensive to maintain file-

servers. In its purest form, your organization simply needs a reliable broadband

internet connection, and a number of PC's attached to that broadband. You don't need

powerful desktop machines any-longer, PC's or MAC's - desktops laptops- don't

mind, and should your machine ever fail, you don't need to worry about

restoring backups and re-installing and re-configuring - simply move to the next

machine and continue working. The cost savings (staff, equipment) and risk reduction

(backups, equipment redundancy) are significant. If you pick your SaaS supplier

wisely, they will be doing all the backups and disaster planning for you. (For the

paranoid and the lawyers out there, some suppliers allow you to take your own

backups of any data, so you can retain some form of independence and choice).

So in summary working via the cloud offers several major benefits:

1. Availability of excellent software, always up-to-date, for a rental fee rather

than one-off purchase.

2. Ability to collaborate and share resources through the internet using this

software.

3. Reduction in overheads in the organization in equipment, software, and staff

by simplifying your IT infrastructure.

4. An Increase in resilience to disaster, and speedier recovery from disaster.

So perhaps that is why Gartner thinks Cloud Computing will be so influential to the

way you work in the future.

What do you think?