What is Cloud Computing?
First off, it’s important to understand that cloud computing is fundamentally about resources:
· Structured and Unstructured Storage (kind of a hybrid of what you may think of as “RAM” or “disk”)
· Compute power (similar to processor or CPU power)
Paradigm shift
Over the last 10-15 years, there has been a large paradigm shift in the models that we use for accessing these two fundamental resources. This has been driven largely by the growth of available bandwidth.
| Model |
Resources Locality |
Power per Device |
Connectivity Model |
Compute Model |
Bandwidth Requirement |
| Mainframe |
Local
|
Large
|
None
|
Centralized
|
None
|
| PC |
Local
|
Small
|
None
|
Centralized
|
None
|
| Networked PC |
Shared Local
|
Small
|
PC-PC
|
Distributed
|
Small
|
| Client-Server |
Mostly centralized, On Network
|
Specialized
|
PC-Server (=Network)
|
Hybrid
|
Small
|
| Internet |
Distributed, Off Network
|
Specialized
|
Network-Network
|
Distributed
|
Medium
|
| Peer to Peer |
Distributed at the fragment level
|
Aggregated Small
|
PC-VirtualNetwork-PC
|
Distributed
|
Medium
|
| Cloud |
Fundamentally transparent as to location
|
Little to N/A
|
Network-Cloud
|
Centralized
|
Large
|
Cloud Services
I will follow this up with posts about each service, but I wanted to list a few here:
· Microsoft Windows Azure - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/
· Salesforce’s Force.com – http://www.force.com
· Amazon.com AWS:
o Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) – http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
o Simple Storage Service (S3) – http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
· Google App Engine - http://appengine.google.com
Value of "The Cloud" to Businesses
· Risk mitigation:
o Downtime: Mythical “100% Uptime”
o Data loss: Data replication
o Server failure: Redundancy
o Natural disaster: Geographical distribution
· Scalability
o “on demand resources”
o Available in small increments
Entrance Software - Cloud Consulting Services
· Cloud Readiness assessment- Contact us!
· Cloud Strategy – Contact us!
· “Port my app” to cloud – rewrite apps to leverage cloud resources
o This may be moving your database into the cloud
o Or very “processor intense” loads to the cloud
o Or the whole application!
o Contact us!
Follow Us
Subscribe