All posts by wp_admin

Cloud Computing “As a Service” Offerings

August 19, 2011 wp_admin Leave a comment

It won’t take long when you start investigating Cloud Computing, for you to come up against several common acronyms. You’ve probably already seen the “AAS” endings already, but these “As A Service” offerings make up the core of the major vendors’ assault on the Cloud. The three we will cover in this article are SAAS,IAAS and PAAS.

What is SAAS?

The venerable old-guard of the Cloud is Software as a Service. Strangely, given its position in the application layer of any solution, you might expect this to be one of the last kinds of solution to become available due to its reliance on other parts of the computing infrastructure.

In reality, many application vendors pushed ahead, either converting existing monolithic solutions, or writing all of the needed infrastructure code themselves to make it possible to run their software package across the internet.

By and large, SAAS packages are written to offer what is known as multi-tenancy. Conceptually this means that a single large instance of the package can support many customers with all necessary safeguards in place to ensure that they never interact with each other (and effectively believe they have the machine to themselves).

This large instance may actually be run across many physical machines, or may be virtualized in such a way that a new virtual machine is run for each customer, giving better separation, but more administration headaches for the vendor.

The economies of scale made possible by this approach and the lower per-user costs that arise are among the strongest reasons for the success of the SAAS model. The downside of such an approach is that all business data associated with the application is completely outside the control of the business using the service.

Example vendor in this space: Salesforce

What is IAAS?

Infrastructure as a service deals with the fundamental building blocks of the IT universe; the processor and storage needs of any application.

With the rise of cheap virtualization solutions, with support built into many modern CPU architectures, it has become much easier to segment or combine the processing power of multiple chips into exactly the right amount of compute capacity.

Not only that, but the dynamic nature of recent virtualization solutions makes it just as easy to add or subtract power when needed as it is to make that initial segmentation.

Network-accessible storage has been available for so long that it is even making its way into domestic usage and so is an obvious addition into a cloud based storage service.

In fact, in many ways, a storage service is a much more easily quantified service offering for a vendor. Storage space used is much easier to measure (at this current time) than just exactly how much of any virtualized chip you have used. Look for this to be an area of extra work in the IAAS space.

Example vendor in this space: Amazon Web Service (Amazon EC2)

What is PAAS?

Platform as a Service is phrase you are more likely to hear if you are dealing with the major computing infrastructure players and springs from all of their earlier works in building service oriented architecture offerings.

While my own experience in this space springs from my work at BEA (before the Oracle acquisition), it is certainly helpful to be able to think of any application as being delivered by a series of layers.

The infrastructure layer in the cloud has been dealt with above, but there is a clearly defined need for a layer that handles all of the heavy-lifting needed to build a reliable, secure, scalable application.

In the heyday of the “application server” we described this as “the software beneath the waterline” on an imaginary iceberg and that analogy is still valid today.

If your business relies on you creating new, highly-targeted applications for your customer base (rather than trying to retro-fit a more generic SAAS solution) then you may be in need of a more “platform” oriented approach.

You should be able to rely on your PAAS vendor to get all of the necessary pieces in place to allow you to build your own cloud application without having to concern yourself with things like the requirements I mentioned above. Not only that, but you also need the PAAS solution to extend further into things like handling multi-tenancy for you and also resource usage measurement – how else will you know how much to charge your customers.

The beauty of the PAAS concept is that it encompasses all of these requirements, throwing in common interfaces to rich clients at the front end and to databases and storage at the back end while keeping all the complexity of that hidden from your business application developers.

We saw a move in the 90’s and 00’s towards application vendors using application servers as their platform of choice for new versions of their software (removing at a stroke the need to support all of that internal “management” functionality). We should fully expect more and more Cloud offerings to also move towards relying on PAAS solutions in the same way. This in turn will allow smaller companies to bring Cloud services to the market that focus on just providing business value without the need to develop the rest of the infrastructure handling.

Example vendor in this space: Oracle

What is the Cloud

5 Good Reasons to Consider Cloud Computing

August 18, 2011 wp_admin Leave a comment

The major vendors of cloud computing services spend a lot of time jostling for position trying to pitch their own unique view of how the Cloud will benefit your organisation.

No matter what their particular selling message may be, it is clear that there are several common reasons why you might find Cloud services helpful in your own IT provision. Here are 5 major reasons to think hard about this approach.

Reliability
Scalability
Agility
Device Independence
Support cost savings.

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

Reliability

Reliability is a key component of any modern business requirements. The average customer has gradually changed their expectations of online interactions with companies to the point where even a small delay on a website can make the difference to whether or not they even stay to do business with you.

Not only that, but the “constant on” nature of the internet means that your business is effectively visible to the entire planet for 24 hours of every single day. Even if your customers are only the internal users of your business systems, major failures in the running of your computer infrastructure can impact business heavily.

Reliability, in the context of Cloud Computing, extends the idea of a failover service or equipment. Where a business might have had a standby system in place, that business may now use cloud services that are geographically distributed but which are available transparently through the kind of location independence that the cloud provides. In a worst-case scenario, these same services may even be provided by alternative suppliers, although this is less likely.

Scalability

Scalability is the bane of many CIO’s life. How do you go about making sure that you have all the power you need for spikes in demand, without having systems lying around unused for the rest of the year?

The beauty of a cloud service offering is that the cost of usage is usually directly related to the number or amount of those services used.

If you have a peak need for more CPU power (say for Christmas e-commerce needs, or end-of-year tax returns), then just kick off a few more virtual machines in the cloud and then release them when the crisis is past.

Agility

Agility is a difficult concept to measure but is cited by many successful organisations as the reason they have been able to pull ahead of their competitors.

Where Cloud Computing is concerned, this is all about being able to tap into the “latest, greatest” solution for your needs without having to commit to all the training and support costs of bringing that capability in-house.

Geoffrey Moore in the “Gorilla Game” talks a lot about moving non-core business systems outside the company, so you can focus on what you are good at (and what brings value to your customer). The cloud allows business to do just that with IT services.

Device Independence

At first glance, device independence may not seem to be such a key advantage. However, with mobile devices now overtaking fixed PC’s as a means of using the internet, device independence is going to become more and more important for maintaining a competitive offering in the market.

For the in-house IT team, this independence allows more flexible equipment deployment for staff and also makes things like remote-working so much simpler, as the internet protocols involved are also location independent for the user.

For an end-customer, device independence means the ability to choose how they interact with your business. The rise of the smartphone and the tablet makes these devices an important gateway into your offing.

Support Cost Savings

Although we have touched on this already, there are enormous savings to be made in terms of keeping in-house expertise available for every IT system you use.

A traditional “large” IT system will include many different technologies, both hardware and software, and will usually need a business to keep staff on hand for most, if not all, of these technologies.

The savings in hardware costs alone should not be underestimated, but these pale into insignificance when compared with the training and employment costs of the IT staff needed over the lifetime of a business system.

While these are by no means the only benefits of a cloud computing solution, they should serve as a big enough wake-up call for any IT management team looking to gain better control of their IT business solution.

Site News

Martin Percival

August 18, 2011 wp_admin Leave a comment

Martin Percival is an experienced IT consultant with 27 years of working in IT behind him.

He is currently Director and Owner of Market Presence Ltd. ; a company formed to help business acquire and retain customers through internet based activity with a special focus on SEO. Market Presence is London based but able to consult across the UK. Expert in SEO, SEM and social media marketing.

Prior to this position, Martin was a Senior Director of Product management at Oracle EMEA after the BEA acquisition made in 2008. He was responsible for outbound middleware messaging to both Oracle and BEA customers at Oracle events across EMEA and he delivered internal training to Sales and Marketing staff on BEA technology and concepts.

Before the acquisition, in his role as Technical Evangelist for BEA across EMEA, he was responsible for delivery of key messages regarding product and strategy to analysts, press and BEA customers. This gave him a deep experience of the technical sales arena and enterprise customer support.

While his recent position has taken him in the direction of marketing for smaller companies, he has retained an interest in the whole middleware infrastructure market with a particular focus on how the cloud and Web 2.0 can help his new customers.

His talents lie in explaining the reasons behind technology, (as well as the technical details themselves), to all levels of organisations and over time he is looking to move towards a CTO role probably via the CTO office of a company.

Specialties

Press and Analyst spokesman, Technical Selling. Conference speaking. Search Engine Optimisation and internet marketing, Enterprise Architectures. SOA, Virtualisation, Web 2.0, BPM, J2EE, XML, Open Source, Unix Kernel

What is the Cloud

What is Cloud Computing?

August 17, 2011 wp_admin Leave a comment

With all the hype in the IT press and the growing awareness of “the Cloud” in the world outside IT, there seems to be a real need to lay out clearly the main characteristics of Cloud Computing.

At its heart, Cloud Computing expands on the work done in building service-oriented architectures to provide network-based services available on an as-needed basis to solve the computing resource problems of organisations or individuals.

These services can themselves consist of almost any kind of computing resource that would traditionally have been installed on a user’s premises. So, for example, they cover every aspect of computing, from CPU and storage requirements at the hardware end, up to full application delivery at the top-tier.

The main benefit to the user of these services is that they are often delivered in a manner which encourages pay-per-use behaviour (even if that may be wrapped in longer term contracts). This allows organisations to scale their usage both quickly and in a controllable manner, where before they may have had to over-specify their own compute solutions to handle peaks in demand.

The promise that Cloud Computing holds for any business, is that the organization should be able to achieve much greater flexibility in its own domain of expertise, without having to focus on the care and feeding of computing resources that are not part of its core business. Not only that, but sweeping changes in IT power and usage can be accommodated by incorporating new cloud services without having to scrap old equipment and restart.

A Cloud Computing Analogy

One of the closest analogies to cloud computing in the real world comes from the availability of electrical power from the main grid whenever it is needed.

We take for granted things like the number of pins on our electrical equipment, but these provide a very real common API into the power system (at least, within one country). When we plug in our device, it works as expected and we get charged according to the electricity used. Not only that, but if we take our device to another part of the country, it still works!

This “location independence” is one of the mainstays of a functional cloud comuting solution. Obviously part of the success of this model is that network access is based on the ubiquity of the internet and the protocols underlying it.

Another big factor in the current acceptance of cloud services is that way in which many of the services being offered have been “abstracted” away from the real computer resources they offer. A storage solution in the cloud would be much less attractive if a business had to know what physical disks were being used so that it could cope with any idiosyncrasies. Although this is a process that has been going on since the dawn of the computer age, many of the higher level cloud services on offer not only offer location independence themselves, but may in turn call upon far-flung resources to deliver their own final solution. As long as the business receives the contracted results, it doesn’t care.

To summarize then, Cloud computing offers much in terms of meeting new IT needs by moving the provision of that IT onto the internet; it provides a clean way for businesses to get exactly the right amount of computing power and functionality when needed, but it also poses “trust” challenges over and above even those of an in-house solution.

Site News

Cloud and Crowd

October 1, 2010 wp_admin Leave a comment

Welcome to Cloud and Crowd.

Over time, this site is going to become your first stopping off point for information on everything concerning software infrastructure. We’re called Cloud and Crowd because that is where the world is changing at the moment.

The collision of Web 2.0 ideas and ubiquitous computing power in the cloud is changing the way business is being done and is shaking the software infrastructure of the world to it’s core.

Will we be ditching SOA and Java?

Absolutely not!

We will, however, be putting it all into context. So where an existing SOA solution is getting expanded into the cloud or perhaps a Java core is used for a new Social Media site, we’ll be there telling you what difference it will all make to how you run your business.

A Crowd Sourced crowdsourcing site?

Yes. It’s pointless to imagine that we will get even close to finding every subtle change going on in business software infrastructure. So that’s where you come in.

If you are first to the information, let us know. First up, you’ll get “Discoverer’s kudos” and who knows there may even be a second up at some point too.