Is cloud computing really just a buzzword? We heard about it over and over – and every year predictions were that “now it will finally get of the ground, we promise”, but it never happened. What is the problem and why doesn’t it work??

In my opinion, problem is what people expects cloud is all about. If you ask people what is cloud computing, common answer is that “cloud computing allows you to take your application and move it somewhere to internet”.

This is something that won’t work. There are few simple reasons – companies don’t want to give up their data and move it somewhere outside and most companies don’t want to invest tons of money to rewrite their applications to run from internet. From this perspective, most famous cloud computing company is probably SalesForce. Well, I don’t fully agree with this definition – we can then say that Hotmail is also cloud computing (which is partially true).

From my perspective, cloud computing is moving your resources to internet and that’s a big difference. Idea that we will move everything to internet now is utopistic – that’s definitely not the way to go for serious companies.

So where is the future? In my opinion it lies with hybrid cloud computing.

Idea is very simple – it doesn’t make sense to make one big bang and simply move everything to internet – it will take ages before we will be (from technology and also trust perspective) to make that jump. Hybrid cloud computing means that you extend your current environment with cloud computing – you can start with 99% local and 1% cloud and then increase cloud ratio slowly if you are successful.

From hybrid cloud computing perspective, cloud is not mostly about applications, it’s mostly about resources – specifically servers.

Think about cloud computing as about environment consisting of virtual servers that are hosted on internet. In case you don’t use those servers, you don’t pay for them.

As we all know, also sentence “just rewrite all your applications to run from internet” doesn’t make too much sense – it’s even problem to rewrite business applications to NOT require IE 6.0. Well, in case you think about cloud computing as hosting platform, you can simply host there your terminal servers\XenApp servers and use your existing applications without any change.

Let me give you some examples.

Example 1 – disaster recovery

Usual requirement is to have disaster recovery plan – in case your environment is not available (for example natural disaster or terrorist attack), you should be capable of rebuilding your environment. Common approach is to have recovery site. But why not prepare that environment in cloud? Because cloud providers have great flexibility in amount of resources, they can guarantee in SLA that if needed, you will get 100 servers in 5 minutes. And of course – if you don’t use them, you don’t pay (or you pay just for virtual storage).

Example 2 – peak times

Consider scenario where you host application that is used by 10 people and 1 server is needed. What if that application got peak times (for example Christmas) when you need 50 servers? Sadly, typical approach is to buy those 50 servers and leave them up and running for rest of year, even though they are needed just for 1 month. Possible solution would be to host those servers in cloud and pay just 1/12 of price instead.

Example 3 – development and test environments

Everyone (especially in enterprise environments) should follow DTAP process (Development –> Test –> Acceptance –> Production). In real life, that’s not always the case and usual reason is lack of resources.

If you have 200 servers in production, test environment with 1 servers doesn’t fully prepare you for everything that could happen. Why not host your dev\test environment in cloud then? You will run it in case you need it and simply destroy it afterwards.

Example 4 – load balancing

Again, peak times – however this time unexpected ones. Part of your farm is destroyed or simply all users decided to try new release of their favorite application at once and performance of your servers is disaster. You could use load balancing and automatically build adequate number of servers in cloud to solve this.

Of course there are TONS of other examples how hybrid cloud computing can be useful. What is however very important (even though not required) is to have decent automation in place.

What is also VERY important to understand is that fact that with hybrid clouds, you don’t  need to host your data in the internet – you can use cloud as a frontend, however keep backend in your network.

If you are interested in hybrid cloud computing, feel free to look at available cloud providers – my favorite ones are GoGrid (though expensive) and FlexiScale (wait for FlexiScale 2.0 – many things will change!). If you would like to have workshop regarding cloud computing, feel free to contact me.

Martin

Maybe you attended my two presentations about cloud computing – first part was about “private” cloud (Live Mesh, SkyDrive, profiles stored on Internet, Ketarin…), second was about “business” cloud.

To summarize it, talking about private cloud, I don’t believe in “everything must go to web” scenarios, but I rather prefer hybrid cloud solutions – accessing online documents from your locally installed applications or using centrally stored configuration for your applications.

For business clouds, I again prefer hybrid solutions – even though I believe that small companies could already use virtual machine hosted on internet (like GoGrid of FlexiScale).

Core component of my private cloud is Live Mesh, but I was seeking for some time to alternative. My biggest complains are the fact that you cannot script Live Mesh and the fact that you cannot create special rules to handle conflicts (and for some folders, I got conflicts every few minutes). I was looking for alternative for some time, however I was not very successful.

Yesterday I installed again Gladinet – Gladinet approach is little bit different than other providers and I like that idea. Instead of building huge infrastructure, they simply provide “wrappers” around existing cloud storages.

If I should describe it to someone that doesn’t have any knowledge about cloud computing or storage, I would describe it as follows:

Gladinet allows you to map your internet-based storages as local folders

Gladinet drive

Among the list of supported storage providers you can find Google, Microsoft (both Azure and SkyDrive) or Amazon (S3).

List of supported providers is pretty impressive

Access your SkyDrive as regular drive

What I find as disadvantages? First of all, some people (Michal “Altair” Valasek) complained about the fact that it is not fully reliable – sometimes files doesn’t display correctly or they are not uploaded – I cannot confirm this (yet) however.

Second complain I got is about the fact that these folders doesn’t support symbolic links – error message returned by mklink is “The device does not support symbolic links.”  If this drive could support symbolic links, it would be much more useful and automated backup and integration with your local computer would be much better.

Third complain is about “Task manager”. Whatever you do (upload\delete…) will be queued to task manager and processed on background, which makes complete sense. I was however not able to find any option to disable automatic popup of task manager whenever you do something.

Task manager will popup whenever you perform any operation with mounted drive.

Just small hint, in case you would like to access Gladinet drive from elevated prompt. Your drive is mounted from \\127.0.0.1\Resources, so to remap it under elevated prompt, simply run Net Use X: \\127.0.0.1\Resources

Martin Zugec