If you happen to fall under the category of someone who has heard of the term “cloud computing”, may have some ideas of what it is, but cannot quite pinpoint what it does and how we can benefit from it, “The Cloud Revolution” written by editor-at-large of InformationWeek Charles Babcock will get you acquainted with the topic in no time. While the book is still technical in nature, those who have worked in and with the technology industry should have no problem following the materials from start to end. The ideal audience would be those in the professions of application and system architect, data center specialist, business analyst, and all the way to CIO, CTO, and COO. What “The Cloud Revolution” provides is a snapshot of where cloud computing is today and presents the snapshot in an easy-to-understand manner. This includes both its potential and challenge.
In a nutshell, cloud computing enables on-demand network access to a shared pool of resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released. It simplifies and drives down the cost of operations while enabling the business users to tap onto the computing power in a way never dreamed before. Today, most businesses over provision what they normally need in terms of computing resources due to operational spikes. But yet, when there is an unforeseeable demand spike, some businesses fail to delivery (have you ever tried to buy movie tickets online during the holidays?). The idea is that instead of buying more and more servers to cater for the spikes and leave the servers way under utilized in normal day operation, outsource the spike (or even the entire operation) to the cloud. How much would that cost? For example, Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) charges $0.085 per instance per hour.
The cloud economy is hard to ignore. Take web hosting as an example. Most bloggers do not host their websites in a server at home (having said that, I know some do). For those who have opted for a paid service, we often have to be mindful on how much disk space and monthly bandwidth we utilize. Right after my holiday to Spain, I have published articles that came with photos on a weekly basis. During the 12 weeks publication period, I had experienced spikes that busted my monthly bandwidth quota and had the site shutdown momentarily several times. There are web hosting companies out there that have grown into a significant size and offer unlimited disk storage and monthly data transfer. That is way more that what I would dream of (though I have my reasons to stay with my existing hosting company). And that is an illustration on how such an economy of scale can benefit the consumers. Imagine what this could mean for the corporates.
As highlighted in the book, there are challenges that corporate users faced with cloud implementation. Not having a control on where the corporate data resides can be an issue. It could be a security risk too. There have been talks about ‘private cloud’ or even a ‘hybrid cloud’ in achieving the economic of scale that lowers the cost using existing data center setup as a benchmark. If corporates can host their in-house applications through virtualization, outsource the spikes to a public cloud, or even consider conducting the system test, user acceptance test, stress test, and etc. that often do not contain real life data outside the private cloud, they may be able to reap the benefits of cloud computing.
Another barrier of taking cloud computing to the next level – as mentioned in the book – is that some of the major standards are still very much proprietary. And it seems to me that the open standard is still at its maturing stage. I think one of the reasons why this book is so named is because if the corporates wish to skip through the proprietary stage, the corporates need to get together and voice out what they want: No vendor lock-in. That is a revolution in a sense, besides the fact that to make cloud computing works, there are changes in almost all levels.
The book has quoted some noteworthy implementations. On the private sector, there is SalesForce.com’s cloud platform – Force.com. On the public sector, in USA, there is NASA’s Nebula Cloud Computing Platform. The author has also quoted a number of major players in cloud computing. If you wish to pick up one book to know what cloud computing is as of today, “The Cloud Revolution” would be it.
External Link: To browse the book in Amazon.com, click here