Choosing the Cloud that’s right for your company.

The Cloud and Cloud Computing

Cloud…Cloud Computing…just more buzzwords?

The BasicsIn a 2008 interview, Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison was asked about the

cloud and he responded with a three minute rant about cloud computing…

“What the h*ll is Cloud Computing?”Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, 2008

“…Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this

idiocy going to stop?” *Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, 2008

This year Larry Ellison announced Oracle is building a cloud service to host many of its key software products, including Java, database,

middleware and CRM.

During that same announcement he also warned: “Beware of false clouds”.

HUH??

* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FacYAI6DY0

So, who can define the cloud?

Webopedia.com says:

Cloud computing relies on sharing computing resources rather than having

local servers or personal devices to handle applications. The goal of cloud

computing is to apply traditional supercomputing, or high-performance

computing power, normally used by military and research facilities, to perform

tens of trillions of computations per second, in consumer-oriented

applications such as financial portfolios or even to deliver personalized information,

or power immersive computer games.

So, Cloud Computing is when we use someone else’s computing power to perform tasks that my less powerful

computer might struggle with?

YES!

Wikipedia.com says: Cloud computing is the delivery of

computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources,

software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a

utility over a network (typically the Internet).

Cloud Computing is you, me, our company, our community, using someone

else's software or hardware – or both – over (usually) the internet?

YES!!

Public Cloud – Private Cloud –

what’s the difference?

Public Cloud describes cloud computing in the traditional mainstream sense, whereby resources are dynamically provisioned to the general public on a fine-grained, self-service basis over the Internet, via web applications/web services, from an off-site third-party provider who bills on a fine-grained utility computing basis….think Amazon Web Services.

Private Cloud is infrastructure operated solely for a

single organization, whether managed internally or by a third-party and hosted

internally or externally.

Hosted INFOR EAM would be considered a private cloud.

There are ‘layers’ of Cloud ComputingSaaS: Software as a Service – a means of delivering software and its associated data over the internet.

IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service – a provision model in which an organization outsources the equipment used to support operations, including servers, hardware, storage and networking components. The service provider houses the equipment and is responsible for housing, running and maintaining it.

PaaS – Platform as a Service – is an outgrowth of SaaS – and can be a combination of SaaS and IaaS. As in the IaaS model, the service provider houses the equipment and is responsible for running and maintaining it – and also provides operating systems, storage and network capacity over the internet.

Here’s the down-side of the cloud – public and private…sometimes, it breaks.

TechCrunch headline from April 21st, 2011: Amazon EC2 goes down, taking with it Reddit, Foursquare and Quora *

CNN Money the following day: …Amazon's cloud Titanic went down**

*http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/04/21/amazon-ec2-goes-down-taking-with-it-reddit-foursquare-and-quora/

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/04/21/major-amazon-outage-ripples-across-web/

**http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/22/technology/amazon_ec2_cloud_outage/index.htm

One thing about the cloud…

Now, let’s talk about a great example of the Public Cloud: Amazon Web Services

• How many shop amazon.com?

• How many are prime customers with access to Amazon Cloud Player music, movies, television and Amazon Cloud Storage?

• Is anyone using Amazon Web Services?

A show of hands…

Elastic – scale up resources or bring resources down as needed.

Quick Scaling – new hardware can be brought online in minutes.

Flexible – no long-term commitment to resources.

Building Blocks – IT resources are provided as individual, separately priced building blocks. You can choose to use one, some, or all of the services AWS provides.

Experimentation – if you have an idea you’d like to try out, you can temporarily access the needed resources without making a long-term commitment. Then de-allocate resources when your experimentation is complete.

Why use Amazon Web Services?

• On a small scale, you can create a few static web pages or a small site for free.*

• Larger companies might use AWS for disaster recovery, training, demos, data storage, overflow processing, regions and zones.

* http://aws.amazon.com/free/

Amazon Web Services: as much or as little as you need

AWS is a pay-as-you-go web service and there is a separate charge for each service you use.

Like the electricity at your home, AWS usage is metered. You pay a monthly fee based on how much you’ve used.

There is an AWS Simple Monthly Calculator to help estimate the cost.*

Some of the pricing dimensions that AWS uses:

* Time – an hour of CPU time * Volume – a gigabyte of transferred data * Count – number of messages queued * Time and Space – a gigabyte-month of data storage

* http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

Cost:

• Host Your Web Site in the Cloud by Jeffrey Barr - a great book for getting started

• http://blog.coredumped.org/2011/02/amazon-t1-micro-instance-with-apache.html

- a very helpful tutorial on installing a t1-micro-instance with Apache

• https://aws.amazon.com/documentation/ - Amazon’s own documentation is an excellent resource

Resources: