Cloud computing technology is driving a fundamental change in today's computing industry, enabling IT managers to treat infrastructure as a common substrate, on which they can provision services to users faster in a much more flexible and cost-effective way without having to re-design or add to the underlying infrastructure.
Cloud infrastructure can reside within the company's data centres or externally on the Internet, via external clouds or off-premise solutions.
There are three different use cases for cloud computing solutions:
Application Clouds: Sometimes referred to as software-as-a-service (SAAS), this provides a wide range of business-level services and information to end users. Example: salesforce.com.
Development Clouds: Sometimes referred to as platform-as-a-service (PAAS), cloud development platforms enable application authoring and provide runtime environments. Example: VMForce and Google App Engine.
Infrastructure Clouds: Also referred to as infrastructure-as-a-service (IAAS), this provides virtual hardware capacity to organisations on an elastic basis. Example: Cloud providers like Airtel, Sify and HCL.
All three types can be deployed in either public or private environments. While public clouds are accessible over the Internet for general consumption and usually don't have the same reliability or security required for business applications, private clouds exist behind the corporate firewall for use by limited or predetermined audiences. A private cloud enables enterprises to deploy resources to environments that meet the business or application needs, on or off premise, without concern for reliability or security.
Benefits
Through cloud computing, enterprises can:
Easily expand scalability and enhance elasticity
Reduce capital expenditure (CAPEX)
Save energy
Increase end-user productivity
Improve reliability
Free up capacity to invest in new projects
Some of the key ingredients to consider when building an internal or external compute cloud:
Self-Service Automated Portal: It is essential to make sure that the compute cloud can be consumed in an easy form by both developers and IT professionals. There is a need for self-service capabilities, and for highly automated provisioning portals that provide the ability to add workloads without having to go through all of the many different steps of provisioning with the network and underlying storage.
Scalable: An effective cloud solution has to be scalable. IT organisations should think about boundary conditions in a more creative way, instead of using the traditional models of scalability. As a new workload request comes up, they must determine where to provision that specific workload.
Strong Multi-Tenancy: This involves extensive use of Virtual Local Area Networks (VLAN) to isolate network traffic between different zones in the cloud.
This is obviously critical in an external cloud, but also a common requirement in internal clouds, to make sure that authorised users have access to certain applications.
Chargeback: IT organisations must be able to create effective and accurate chargeback capabilities. For internal clouds, even if funds aren't literally exchanged, the ability to create transparency in costs and services can help justify expenses.
New options
Cloud computing is providing enterprises with a fundamentally new way to cost-effectively and quickly deploy services and capabilities. It enables IT organisations to transform the way they operate and dramatically improve how consumers access their information and experience applications.
Enterprises that are looking for ways to streamline internal IT operations and to expand on-premise infrastructure to add capacity on demand, as well as organisations wanting a fully outsourced infrastructure, are investigating the many advantages of cloud computing.
(The author is Senior Technical Manager, VMware)
