Multiple Experts Try Defining "Cloud Computing"

jg21 writes "Even though IBM's Irving Wladawsky Berger reports a leading analyst as having said recently that 'There is a clear consensus that there is no real consensus on what cloud computing is,' here are no fewer than twenty attempts at a definition of the infrastructural paradigm shift that is sweeping across the Enterprise IT world — some of them really quite good. From the article: 'Cloud computing is...the user-friendly version of grid computing.' (Trevor Doerksen) and 'Cloud computing really is accessing resources and services needed to perform functions with dynamically changing needs. An application or service developer requests access from the cloud rather than a specific endpoint or named resource.' (Kevin Hartig)"

Comments

It's as easy as defining ...

[Mean Variance]

• Web 2.0
• .NET

What they mean is

[Scareduck]

buzzword-compliant computing. I hate stories like this, which are really just cover for somebody's marketing.

Cloud computing is..

[Wowsers]

Cloud computing is a privacy destroyer. That's my definition.

sysadmin perspective

[mattmarlowe]

Hrm, maybe it's just my background in systems administration, but I thought cloud computing was just an inevitable combination of large scale web hosting with virtualization.

In late 1990's, businesses generally had their own internet server(s) in a colo facility.

In the early 2000's, some companies outsourced their internet infrastructure to managed service providers - other companies built their own in-house data centers to keep up with escalating application requirements.

In the mid 2000's, server sprawl started to impact practically everyone...the first 100 boxes you deploy can be somewhat interesting, but after that... you're entire admin staff (outsourced or not) ends up spending all its time dealing with faults in existing hardware rather than deploying new services...plus electricity/cooling/etc all get more expensive so everyone starts to figure out ways to avoid putting in new boxes. Poof, in comes with virtualization that's actually reliable and actually interesting when it disassociates the virtual machines from worrying about hardware at all and allows them to move from system to system w/o any need for sysadmins to press the "fail over" or "load balance" buttons.

Now, in 2007, smart marketing and product development people at amazon and elsewhere decide they can take over the web hosting industry by heavily commercializing the large virtualization clusters amazon has already deployed...and poof, wrappers to allow developers to create virtual machines and access back end San storage for the clusters are written, along with other stuff that will appeal to anyone who doesn't have a large existing infrastructure..and it's called "cloud computing". To avoid losing out, everyone else says they have their own cloud computing plans/etc...

Now, I guess this is all there and good...but I always thought that what differentiated good hosting facilities from each other was the quality of the admin staff, customer service, defined SLA's and 24/7 emergency response, comprehensive application monitoring, combined with general availability of senior system architects...all of which I don't think amazon/et al have seriously addressed. That means good managed service or web hosting companies can still succeed by either building their own large virtualization clusters and calling them clouds or rebranding and adding value on top of amazon and other cloud providers.

Re:sysadmin perspective

[mattmarlowe]

OK, let's analyze the arguments you make against cloud computing again:

a) centralization verse decentralization waves with Mainframe as metaphor

Mainframes were replaced by PC's because of affordability/cost. People who had very limited access to a $100K - $1M mainframe could suddenly have unlimited access to a PC for under $5K. The economics drove the change.

Let's look at the cost of an extremely minimal cloud: 3 Server Class PC's with extensive networking/ram/cpu and virtualization software ($15K), San Storage ($10K), Management Station/Software ($5K), Network Infrastructure ($10K), SysAdmin Setup ($10K?) which combined means that a small business would need to spend ~$50K to begin to have something they could work with locally to gain a minimal comparative environment to an external cloud. This doesn't include ongoing maintenance, staff time, and power/cooling/etc. I'm guessing startup time with this approach would be a minimum of 30 days and probably 90.

Or, they could start immediately with an external cloud for probably no setup fee and a few K/month with almost zero long term commitments. So, it may be true that eventually clouds will be everywhere, at the moment...the economics is strongly against it. In fact, I think most companies deploying internal clouds today are seeing costs >$100K for just the initial stage.

b) control of data

This is a much better argument. On the other hand, it can be used against any outsourcing proposal and is nothing specific to clouds. I've certainly been in situations where businesses with absolutely zero in house technical and/or security talent insist data be kept at home, even after being shown that they're already leaking it everywhere and are likely to be forced out of business by regulators because they won't trust anyone to fix the infrastructure for them or outsource the security aspects to a proven supplier. In the end, external clouds are a tools like anything else and smart businesses will make the appropriate decisions on what they can and can not deploy on them.

Note that I'm not a big fan of all the marketing of clouds at the moment. I'm also skeptical of amazon/et all, but that doesn't mean there isn't some real technical worth to the ideas that brought clouds into being or that many small and some medium sized businesses wouldn't be better served by avoiding large internal infrastructure purchases and outsourcing the responsibilities to professional MSP's/hosting facilities.

Re:buzz words

[verbamour]

In regular computing, you don't know what's being done.

Cloud computing is the same, except that you don't know where it's being done either.

Nasrudin said it best

[ghostlibrary]

Defining things has always been a problem:

The king's three scholars had accused Nazrudin of heresy, and so he was brought into the king's court for trial.

In his defense, Nazrudin asked the scholars, "Oh wise men, what is bread?"

The first scholar said, "Bread is sustenance; a food."

The second scholar said, "Bread is a combination of flour and water exposed to the heat of a fire."

The third scholar said, "Bread is a gift from God."

Nazrudin spoke to the king, "Your Majesty, how can you trust these men? Is it not strange they cannot agree on the nature of something they eat every day, yet are unanimous that I am a heretic?"

(From The Trial of Nasrudin

amongst all the babble..

[Anonymous Coward]

"This has the advantage of reducing single points of failure." That must be the quest. Definiton unnecessary, for me anyway.