Get your heads out of the cloud!!! (A down to earth talk about cloud computing) pt.1 (2007 hits)
By GREG GREENLEE
Yes that’s right, another article aimed at explaining the cloud. I’m sorry but I had to do it. I am literally sick of articles written by industry professionals who attempt to explain the cloud but by the end of the article the reader is still left wondering what the cloud really is. The reader still believes that the cloud is some big one-eyed, omni-present mythical creature out in the land of the interwebs. Hopefully by the end of this multi-part series you will finally see and understand what really makes up the Cloud.
To understand what the cloud is we must first understand what it isn’t:
It’s not some big huge super computer ran by some man behind the curtain that has access to any and everything we do on the internet. It’s not some void less abyss where all the data in the world resides and is magically summoned when you need it.. It’s not the Matrix and it’s not all bad. The term “cloud” got its start from network diagrams layouts that displayed the internal workings of a company’s network infrastructure (routers, switches, connections, servers, etc.). When it came to depicting the internet and the connection to it from the enterprise network, the internet was shown as a great big cloud. This cloud representation abstracted all the underlying complexities that made the internet work.
“Abstraction? What is this abstraction you speak of?”
I was just getting to that part. Think of abstraction as making the simple visible and the complex hidden. For instance, the driver’s seat of your car abstracts the inner workings of everything else from steering to letting up and down your windows, to operating your radio. All you are presented with is buttons and a steering wheel, gas pedal and brake. All the complexities that make those mechanisms actually work are hidden from you.
This is a primary and fundamental concept when it comes to virtualization and cloud computing whether it’s IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service or SaaS (Software as a Service) . The entire underlying infrastructure (storage, compute resources, networking, security) are hidden from the end user and what’s presented is an interface for you to use to store your files, listen to your music, deploy your code, or “spin up” virtual machine instances.
I will delve more into abstraction and the different “as a Service” models later in the series. Products like Google Music, Dropbox, Salesforce and even Amazon EC2 services are great examples of the different models of cloud computing.
So what is cloud computing you ask and how does it work?
Cloud computing in a nutshell is utility computing. It’s identical in principle to the utilities that you use in your house: a metered set of finite resources that enables you to only pay for what you use and is scalable on demand. In case of cloud computing, the resources being consumed are CPU, memory, bandwidth and storage.
“What’s all this scalable on demand, metered resources stuff?”
Let me explain. In order for a computing platform to be considered cloud computing it has to adhere to some basic criteria. One of those is that it has to be scalable on demand. Meaning if I need more or less compute resources such as memory or CPU, I have the ability to scale up or down those resources.
Let’s use home utilities to make this clearer. During the spring time around late May I am usually not running my AC because it’s not hot enough, so I am not using as much electricity. But what happens if I suddenly get a week where the temperatures are in the upper nineties? I would need to turn on my AC and consume more electricity. If I had a fixed consumption limit I wouldn’t be able to use any more electricity to power my AC, but because it’s a scalable utility I am able to increase my electricity consumption when I need it and decrease my consumption when I don’t need it. Scalability is one of the central tenets of cloud computing and one of the reasons it is as popular as it is with medium and large business whose growth is dependent on their ability to add to their computing infrastructure cheaply and efficiently. This is the power and beauty of cloud computing.
There is much more to explain and learn and I’ve just begun. Stay tuned for part 2 of this series where I’ll talk about virtualization, hypervisors, computing resources and the different cloud computing models.
