Cloud Computing

In my earlier blog Is there a Standard for Cloud adoption? I wrote on the cloud standards initiative which would help enterprises to be aware and adopt when it matures.
After Open Standards, in this blog let us look what are the Options available to the enterprise to leverage Open Source Software.

First wave of internet computing, got innovative alternate stack – LAMP (Linux OS, Apache Web Server, MySQL database, PHP/Python/Ruby on Rail Web development).
Similarly, now on the second wave of internet computing (Cloud Computing), what are the emerging Open source alternatives? Tim O’Reilly had his view on this topic.

It can be divided under two broad areas a) To Build the Cloud b) To Manage the Cloud.

To Build the Cloud

Both public cloud providers and Private cloud harness the wave 1 LAMP stack. In addition to that, there are open source software stacks to build the cloud.
Among the available options of Eucalyptus, Globus Nimbus, Open Nebula – Eucalyptus has the widest adoption.

Eucalyptus is compatible with Amazon Web services API (EC2). Eucalyptus is getting used by public cloud providers and enterprises who want to build their private clouds.
Another open source software which is seeing wider acceptance is Apache Hadoop. Hadoop helps to process large amount of data in parallel. Hadoop uses Google Map Reduce & File system concepts. For enterprise high work load computing needs like risk, drug discovery modeling Hadoop would enable the parallel processing using the Cloud infrastructure.

To Manage The Cloud

This is at an early stage and there are no mature options as on now. However, there will be open source Cloud tools around Identity & Access management, Integration, Interoperation, Monitoring, Management etc.

Does your enterprise use or planning to look open source software option for Cloud Computing?     

Posted by Lakshmanan G at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week I presented a session at the Microsoft Worldwide partner conference in New Orlenes on the topic of migrating an on-premises application to the Azure Cloud. We took an real life example of the Infosys Green applications and demonstrated how did we migrated this application Azure with a minimal changes to the existing application.

This pattern of application migration to cloud is very relevant for ISVs both from a business and technology perspective. Cloud provides a scalable platform for the applications designed as on-premise, single tenant application to be delivered over the Internet for multiple tenants.

From a business standpoint, the pay by use model of consuming the infrastructre helps the ISVs to align their running cost with the revenues derived by offering this application to the customers in a SaaS model. Offering the ISV application on the cloud also opens the reach to new customers and geographies.

Posted by Jitendra Pal Thethi at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

http://www.microsoft.com/azure/pricing.mspx

I have taken a stab at comparing the Azure pricing versus value proposition vis-à-vis that of the two other major cloud providers in the market today. Let me first call out, although Amazon’s compute services (EC2) are in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) category and folks may argue that comparing it with the likes of other Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers is not really an apples to apples comparison.

Continue Reading on "Public Clouds,What sets them apart?" >>

Posted by Sidharth Ghag at 03:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I saw the Microsoft Azure Pricing announcement and related buzz; I thought it will be a good idea to compile & compare the different cloud service provider pricing. I have attempted a high-level comparison in this post.

At the same time, I was also thinking that - is "price" the "only important" criteria to win cloud battle? I feel that - the platform differences is much broader, the gaps between the service offerings are much larger and market penetration strategy & trends are very different.

So, "who" OR "what" is going to strike the winning deal?

Summary

As I said, the comparison is at high-level and one needs to read the fine-print on respective service provider website. I used the following key references:

• Microsoft Azure Pricing, Licensing & SLA Overview
• Google AppEngine Billing & Budgeting Resources
• Amazon JavaScript Price Calculator
• NetMagic Solutions (India based) Pricing

The prices are subject to change, also it does not represent actual cost of specific variants for e.g. high performance CPU, Windows Server with or without security support and support for SQL Server etc. Please refer to the specific URLs for actual pricing and SLA information. The price for NetMagic Solutions could not be confirmed from the vendor / website, it is taken from one of the BusinessWorld article published recently - it may not represent actual price offered by the vendor.

Also, I could not compile prices for multiple other vendors; please feel free to post related information. I also thought of compiling this pricing information in a tabular format for apple-to-apple comparison - just to provoke :-); I will try to do it offline, in the meanwhile I am expecting some more information, cribs & brickbats.

So, who is going to win?

I strongly feel that the price is not the only criteria for winning. 

I have put down some criterias below, please feel free to correct me and/or add to this: 

• Platform Capability & Maturity - Infrastructure autonomics, PaaS & SaaS alignment, etc
• Technology Stack Support & Ease of Migration - J2EE, .Net, PHP etc
• Service Management Capabilities - Billing, Payment, Tracking, Health Dashboard, etc
• Market Penetration & Adoption - Developers, Partners, System Integrators, ISVs, Customers

I feel that - System Integrators, Third Party ISVs and open-source are the key channel partners to drive market adoption and penetration; which will strike the winning deal.

The flexibility & proactiveness of the cloud service providers to partner with SIs and 3rd party ISVs (add-ins, solutions, products complementing to the mainstream cloud platform offering) will definitely help drive leadership.

I welcome your thoughts.

Posted by Bhavin Jayantilal Raichura at 04:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week, I was presenting a session on Cloud Computing: Balancing Economics & Innovation organized by NASSCOM Emerge Forum for SMEs.

While I was able to create excitement by demonstrating The Economics of Cloud Computing; >95% of the senior executives were concerned on the security. I said hold on till Eureka! – It was the last section of my presentation along with audience poll. I asked 2 questions:

• “You gonna buy a house or rent one?”
• “Where you gonna keep your gold?”

The response to the last question self-answered most of the security concerns.

I was also very satisfied about the fact that - audience was able to discuss the trade-offs involved in the decision making about cloud vs. other options. This gave me immense pleasure because - before the session, when I asked a question “How many of you think that cloud computing can benefit you?” - I did not find great response; I said I will repeat this question towards the end also.

Summary

I preferred to answer the questions in non-technical way as I saw the room was full-of the people, who are more business oriented than technology, multiple decision makers from emerging companies and several others from large organizations.

I said – “in my opinion while the security related concerns are genuine, it is more of perception problem than technical one. Everything that you can do in traditional approach for security; you will be able to do (tomorrow if not today) on cloud also.” What you might not get today is a physical key to your datacenter. But over-a-period of time, you might get that too with a private cloud at service provider premises – the definition of private cloud may accommodate this use case to strengthen ROI models – I am just guessing.

The most of the audience was comfortable with putting their gold investments in bank safe locker or “something similar to that” – it was an obvious argument; however I took the other-way-round; less than 5% was ready to keep the gold at home! The common thing between all of them was – “they need a physical key, and no compromise on that”; they were OK with a shared key as in case of bank safe locker.

Did you miss this event? You can attend a similar event organized by NASSCOM EmergeOut Forum at Delhi, find details here, Thanks a lot to Avinash (Regional Director, NASSCOM Northern Region) for sharing it.

Also, share your thoughts (am I inviting trouble?) on security on cloud - perception & reality.

Posted by Bhavin Jayantilal Raichura at 05:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Entrepreneurship has been identified as the primary growth engine of any Economy. In the early 1990s when India opened up its markets to Globalization, we saw the spirit of entrepreneurship receiving a tremendous impetus cited with several instances of Startups or Small and medium sized businesses growing leaps and bounds benefiting the nation’s economy. Infosys has been an excellent example of how entrepreneurship has contributed to India’s growth and that too both in tangible and intangible value terms bringing global recognition of India’s Knowledge driven economy.  However Entrepreneurs face several challenges which impediments to their growth. A few of the challenged being

·         Limited exposure to capital  for running their businesses

·         Limited access to experienced IT resources

·         Lacking processes and systems which can help grow their businesses

·         Inability to Innovate

IT has been the catalyst which helps businesses to foster growth, which Entrepreneurs have not truly been able to leverage very effectively. This primarily being due to the high entry barriers, primarily owing to the high capital which needs to be invested upfront in terms of hardware and software, associated in building applications and systems even before the Enterprise would have started earning any revenue. Due to this the traditional IT delivery model has not been conducive for Entrepreneurs to innovate as the risk associated with failure is very high.

With the latest computing paradigm aka “Cloud Computing”, the IT barriers have dropped and entrepreneurs can now look at leveraging IT as a tool for innovation which can script more growth stories.

Wikipedia states,” An entrepreneur is a person who has possession of an enterprise, or venture, and assumes significant accountability for the inherent risks and the outcome.”

An entrepreneur could be a startup or even the small and medium size businesses (SMBs). Entrepreneurs usually tend to work in niche market segments addressing needs which the larger enterprises are not able to meet. They have a higher risk appetite but usually with an acute shortage of capital generally just enough to meet their business goals. Their businesses are primarily driven by operational revenues and each Penny is worth a Pound. They are nimble, primarily owing to their size, and able to respond to changing market dynamics speedily. Globally, they have been recognized as the primary economic growth engines for a nation.

Entrepreneurs look at IT being the back-bone to help them drive their businesses and to fuel growth. This is further substantiated by the fact that, their IT spending growth (8%) particularly in the SMB segment is faster than the IT spending growth (6%) of an enterprise. Additionally in the emerging markets the spending growth is around 14% whereas in the developing economies it is 7%.

However they face several challenges in terms of using IT, a few of them being:

1.       Insufficient working capital to invest in IT which can handle growth

2.       Businesses are less IT Savvy, primarily since they do not have a dedicated IT department.

3.       Also prefer to buy from local or regional vendors with more personalized support

Being at the bottom of the business pyramid these businesses primarily focus on local regional markets. They are also known as the long tail, characterized by nominal IT spending individually but as a group they form a big market segment to reckon with.  The SMB market offers a large market opportunity: Global SMB IT spending was around $ 513 Bn in 2007, projected to reach to about $ 750 Bn by 2012.

Even in these times of Recession they are a promising segment to tap into. As per the recent AMI-Partners survey to understand the impact of current economic downturn on SMB:

·         SMBs continue to remain optimistic, even though they are cautious with growth expectations

·         Investments may shift to solutions focused on driving efficiency and revenue

·         There is a marked increase in SMBs planning to invest in SaaS - 23% now v/s 14% earlier

This segment offers a large opportunity, untapped by GDM based IT majors presenting a case before us to pursue this market aggressively. With Cloud Computing, – “a model for enabling convenient, demand shared pool network access to a set of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” – NIST Cloud Computing project, the characteristics of which closely map and provide a solution to address the challenges which the SMB’s are grappling with today. Indicating this market segment could be the early adopters on the cloud providing some of the following potential benefits

·         Cloud as new business enabler  enabling new apps and new business models to explore

·         Low user friction to adopt cloud

·         Internet standard abstractions enabling access anytime, anyplace and anywhere

·         Potential cost savings

Service Integrators existing service offerings and delivery models would have to be revisited and positioned accordingly to meet the needs of the entrepreneurs.  At the same time new business models will have to be explored to tap this segment effectively.

If you have an opinion, it would be great to hear back from you.

Posted by Sidharth Ghag at 07:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Google plans to release its Chrome OS on netbooks(laptop computers with very limited computing power and storage, intended mainly for internet users). The removal of the "beta" tag from Google Apps like Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar etc. a move, which according to watblog "is clearly targeted at the business community and to send a message out that Google apps can now be considered as a serious investment." , will solve the traditional limitations imposed due to limited computing power and storage to certain extent. Businesses will be able to use the Chrome OS with Google Apps to meet most of their requirements.

An assumption that is made here is that the personal computer will be used only for sending or receiving mails, editing texts or browsing the net. But what if I need run a processor intensive application? Where will I store chunks of data? The obvious answer is the cloud (assuming that internet band width is not a bottleneck). The cloud will provide users with processing power and storage according to their necessity.

The major shift that will happen is that cloud usages will descent to the common user. The cloud, till now, is mainly used by software professionals who utilize the advantages including reduced hardware costs and on demand scalability. But, as of now, resource procurement is not straight forward or user-friendly. Amazon AWS, for example, uses console level command line tools as the primary interface to AWS. The alternative, ElasticFox plugin or RightScale interface, also needs a lot of user interaction and knowledge. The ordinary user cannot be expected to go through the whole process just to run an ordinary application.

What is required here is a user friendly, direct and secure way in which applications can use the computing power and storage from a remote cloud, with minimal user interaction. The option should be as simple as Run Application on the Cloud, which in turn should call the back end API's which will take care of all the connectivity, allocation and security issues. Enterprise level public clouds, like AWS would need to provide functionality where individual applications would be able to dynamically locate and utilize the remote resources.

All said, Google Chrome OS, I feel, is filling a much needed niche in operating system implementation. The gen-next internet users, with uninterrupted net connectivity, will prefer the advantages that a high-speed internet OS provides like quick startup, fewer or no hardware issues, higher resiliency etc., over its disadvantages like security, confidentiality, loss of control etc.

Posted by Kiran C Nair at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the key promises made by IaaS is scalability on demand. This is a completely new arena as far as traditional program development is considered. Traditional programming practices consider that the general the computing power, network bandwidth, memory etc are invariable over time or at least until the next system upgrade. But cloud computing not only shatters this belief, but also brings forth a set of questions of its own.

Q1: How will my application behave due dynamic infrastructure scaling? Can I design my application in such a way as to maximize this advantage?

Q2: What are the additional overheads that an on-demand scalable system brings to your response time?

Q3: Is it possible to predict my system performance on a dynamically scalable environment with the results I have from my development/test environment?

 Just asking some questions here... No specific answers

Posted by Kiran C Nair at 06:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

As part of the NASSCOM Friday's 2.0 sessions, under the aegis of the NASSCOM EMERGE Forum, I would be taking an interactive session on "Cloud Computing: Balancing Economics & Innovation” on 10th July 2009 at the Infosys office. I would also be accompanied by one of my friend Srinivas Prabhala.

Lets connect, socialize & share experiences.

Theme: Balancing Economics & Innovation

Every wave of technology innovation is perceived as “opportunities for small & medium enterprises (SMEs)” and “paradigm-shift for large enterprises”. The key observation is that - the SMEs have higher appetite for risks & innovation; however, they are constrained by limited budget. In response to the technology innovation waves, questions & concerns from the Entrepreneurs do not change:

• Revenue: How cloud computing can become a new revenue channel?
• Expenditure:  How cloud computing can help optimize current IT expenditure and improve ROI efficiency?
• Competitive Edge: How cloud computing can accelerate service innovation for competitive edge that attracts funding investments?
• Market Penetration: How cloud computing can help me penetrate the market and increase business growth?

Cloud computing brings business value in all the 4 dimensions – it acts as a “catalyst” for evolution of new biz start-ups and it also acts as a “survival pill” for many Enterprises in this economic down-turn. The important thing is that - the value of cloud computing can be more clearly articulated with the help of concrete business-cases and ROI models for faster decision making – this is what CXOs need , the bottom-line is “show me the money”.
 
Once convinced about the business value, the next  big question is “what should be the right strategy to jump on this boat ?” The answer to this question could be a decision analogy  around –Buy a house or rent one ? - It is clear – “one size do not fit all”.
 
We will discuss & debate the how enterprises have benefited from cloud computing; what sort of new business services are visualized on cloud; how cloud computing can optimize TCO and how cloud computing can help with business growth & market penetration – more importantly - “economically”.

For registrations, please visit NASSCOM website here.

Posted by Bhavin Jayantilal Raichura at 02:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)