Cloud ComputingSoup To Nuts

Joe DrumgooleJoe.Drumgoole@ndrc.ie

http://twitter.com/jdrumgoolehttp://joedrumgoole.com/blog

Cloud Computing : Definition

• Virtualised Infrastructure

• Pay as You Use Billing

• Unbounded access to Resources

• Scale down as easily as you scale up

Virtualised Infrastructure

VCPU VCPU VCPU VCPU VCPU VCPU VCPU VCPU

Real CPU Real CPU

SharedDisk

SharedDisk

SharedDisk

SharedDisk

Pay as You Use Billing

Unbounded Access To Resources

Scale Down as Easily as you Scale Up

Isn't it Just like...

Mainframes Time Sharing 

Web Hosting

Co-location

1m up front fee

Your process can ruin my day

Limited to websites

Can't scale down

Software as a Service vs Cloud Computing

SaaS End user service

Branded

Billing per user

Often Free

Cloud

Needs programmers

Unbranded

Billing by resource usage

Pay to Play

Why Now?

• Cost of Storage : 1TB, 88 Euros• Multi-core Chipsets/Multi-chip motherboards• Cheap virtualisation software (Xen)• Intel/Linux hegemony• Broadband everywhere• 10 years knowledge of building scalable

software• Excellent Open Source Software (LAMP, Rails,

Django, Danga)

The Players

• Amazon– Storage, Compute, Queuing, Entity Store, EBS, CDN

• Microsoft– Storage, Compute, Queuing, Entity Store

• Google– Storage, Compute (App Engine)

• GoGrid– Storage, Compute

• Mosso– Storage, Compute

• Nirvanix– Storage

Example Costs

• Unlimited storage @ $0.15 per GB/month

• Linux/Windows Instance @ $0.10/$0.125 per hour

• 365 * 24 * 0.10 = $876 per year

• Watch the per transaction costs!

• SmugMug saved over 1m dollars in y1

The Problem Areas

• The Data Problem

• The Britney Spears Problem

• The Programmer Problem

• The Doctor Problem

• The End User Problem

• The Failure Problem

An Example Grid

Load BalancerPerlBal

App Server

App Server

App Server

Task Server

Task Server

DatabaseServer

Blog/Static Web Site

S3

1800 Euros a Month including 2TB of storage

Summary

• Its Cheap

• Its flexible

• Its not a silver bullet

• Its enabling a whole new class of business

• The game starts when Azure launches

Q&A