It is hard these days to pick up a technology magazine or to read an IT blog without coming across reference to “the cloud”. From novices to pundits, everyone is talking about the cloud. The problem is not everyone agrees on what cloud is, or what its impact is on the modern IT landscape.
Blind Man’s Elephant?
Cloud computing today can be best described as a blind man’s elephant. The perception, understanding and reality of Cloud depend on who is selling it, and who is buying it.
This confused state of affairs is further aggravated by the vendors in the IT marketplace. Today, everyone from a hardware vendor to a software product company to a services organization call what they sell "Cloud".
The customers are not far behind in escalating the situation. Driven by the pressure from the business to invest in cloud, IT organizations have taken to calling their existing execution models as Cloud.
Due to all this focus on wordplay, everything from managed services to hardware lease models, to virtualized infrastructure, to innovative sourcing / financial models today are referred to as "Cloud".
A Part vs the Whole
Almost every time a customer talks about needing a "Cloud" model, they are referring to a 'feature' that cloud provides, and which can generally be easily achieved within their existing landscape.
For e.g., when a customer says that he wants cloud to take the assets off his books, he is looking for an OPEX vs. a CAPEX. This can be done through asset leasing / IaaS providers. Similarly, when customers ask for speed of provisioning / asset reclaim, the same can easily be achieved through higher virtualization and some automation tools.
True, cloud provides features like scalability, self-service, elasticity, utility / usage based pricing, agility, better resource utilization, code movement and metering among many others, but any one (or more) of these features in a solution do not a cloud make. High degree of virtualization is NOT cloud. Paying for a server over a period of time instead of upfront is NOT cloud. Hosted, managed services is NOT cloud. Pay-per-use is NOT cloud. And simply attaching ‘as a service(aaS)’ behind a traditional service is most certainly NOT cloud.
Defining Cloud
In simple English, cloud refers to technology delivery framework where the collective capacity of multiple IT components like Servers, Storage, Network devices etc. is made available to the user(s) on a per unit usage basis over the internet.
A true "Cloud" model is architecturally different from traditional IT landscape, and often has its own development and management platforms. There are primarily 3 flavors of cloud available today, and they can be viewed in a simple hierarchical model of Infrastructure, OS + Development platform and Application:
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): OS down capacity provided in utility model
Platform as a service (PaaS): Dev platform down capacity provided in utility model
Software as a service (SaaS): Application down capacity provided in utility model
These 3 flavors can be deployed either in a large, sophisticated datacenter owned by a single organization, and shared among multiple customers, or in the datacenter of an enterprise and used by only the people in the same organization. The first model is known as a Public Cloud while the second is known as a Private Cloud.
Final Word:
It is important to understand that the cloud computing industry represents a large ecosystem of many models, vendors, and market niches. This definition attempts to encompass all of the various cloud approaches. Further, Cloud computing is still an evolving paradigm. Its definitions use cases, underlying technologies, issues, risks, and benefits will be refined in a spirited debate by the public and private sectors. These definitions, attributes, and characteristics will evolve and change over time.
Copper Mobile is a mobile application development firm, with headquarters in Dallas, Texas. The company has made its niche as one of top iPhone app developers in Dallas and mobile application companies in Noida
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