What is Cloud Computing ?
First off, It’s important to understand that cloud computing is fundamentally about resources:
- Structured and Unstructured Storage (kind of a hybrid of what you may think of as “RAM” or “disk”
- Compute power (similar to processor or CPU power)
Paradigm Shift
Over the last 10-15 years, there has been a large paradigm shift in the models that we use for accessing these two fundamentals resources. This have been driven largely by the growth of available bandwidth
| Model | Resources Locality | Power per Device | Connectivity Model | Compute Model | Bandwidth Requirement |
| Mainframe | Local | Large | None | Centralized | None |
| PC | Local | Small | None | Centralized | None |
| Networked PC | Shared Local | Small | PC-PC | Distributed | Small |
| Client-Server | Mostly centralized, On Network | Specialized | PC-Server (=Network) | Hybrid | Small |
| Internet | Distributed, Off Network | Specialized | Network-Network | Distributed | Medium |
| Peer to Peer | Distributed at the fragment level | Aggregated Small | PC-VirtualNetwork-PC | Distributed | Medium |
| Cloud | Fundamentally transparent as to location | Little to N/A | Network-Cloud | Centralized | Large |
Cloud Services
I will follow this up with posts about each service, but I wanted to list a few here:
- Microsoft Windows Azure – http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/
- Salesforce’s Force.com – http://www.force.com
- Amazon.com AWS: – Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service – http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ , http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
- Google App Engine – http://appengine.google.com
Value of “The Cloud to Businesses
Risk Mitigation
- Downtime: Mythical “100% Uptime”
- Data Loss: Data Replication
- Server Failure: Redundancy
- Natural Disaster: Geographical Distribution
- Scalability: On Demand Resources, Available in small increments
Entrance – Cloud Computing Services – Cloud Readiness Assessment: Contact Us!
Cloud Strategy: Contact Us!
“Port my app” to Cloud – rewrite apps to leverage cloud resources
- This may be moving your database into the cloud
- Or very “processor intense” loads to the cloud
- Or the whole Application!