Cloud Computing

‘Off-the-shelf’ Computing power on rent

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction(Source: NIST Cloud Computing Project)

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Enterprise IT is entering a phase of … Deep technological change.This is driven by three key factors:

Sprawl of physical servers. Particularly after the mass penetration of x86 machines in datacenters, with x86 shipments worldwide growing by 64% from 4.7 million to 7.8 million between 2003 and 2008. The consequences of this include energy waste, ballooning capital expenditures (capex), and sprawling maintenance and real-estate costs.New business requirements. Ever since the economic crash of 2009, businesses have needed to be much more agile than they used to be, but this requirement often clashes with the traditional, static approach to IT infrastructure, which is typically only able to adapt and change slowly.Interconnected, diverse client device install base. The growing number of mobile and non-standard computing devices (smartphones, media tablets, mininotebooks) used in enterprises means that IT departments need to provide access to a wide array of platforms, anywhere, anytime, in a secure way.

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First step towards the changeVirtualizationWhat does it mean?

Virtualization, in computing, is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as a hardware platform, operating system, a storage device or network resources. – WikipediaVirtualization is a technique for hiding the physical characteristics of computing resources to simplify the way in which other systems, applications, or end users interact with those resources. - about.com

Why do we need it?Firstly, to consolidate computing resources for raising utilization ratio.

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Virtualization: How does it work?

An over-simplified view

Problems with this schemeWhat if the machines in the ‘disintegration’ form had different hardware?What if the different machines were using different operating systems?What if the applications were using specific features of the underlying system?In essence, how can we use a homogenous ‘server farm’ to cater to all the idiosyncrasies of all individual machines and applications?

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Way outAdd a layer on top of the servers that would create the illusion that the user is getting exactly the system he/she is looking forThis is Virtual Machine Monitor or HypervisorVirtualization comes in many categories

Server virtualizationhides the physical nature of server resources, including the number and identity of individual servers, processors and operating systems, from the software running on them.

Storage virtualizationmelds physical storage from multiple network storage devices so that they appear to be a single storage device

Network virtualizationcombines computing resources in a network by splitting the available bandwidth into independent channels that can be assigned to a particular server or device in real-time

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Diagrammatically …

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A bit more on Server virtualizationThere are several kinds of virtualization techniques which provide similar features but differ in the degree of abstraction and the methods used for virtualization.Hosted architecture – broadest support (hosted solution)

A hosted architecture installs and runs the virtualization layer as an application on top of an operating system and supports the broadest range of hardware configurations.

Hypervisor architecture – efficient (Bare Metal solution)

Full virtualization (using binary translation)OS-assisted virtualization or ParavirtualizationHardware-assisted virtualization (first generation)

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Next step towards deep technological changeCloud computingVirtualization is a key enabler for the Cloud delivery modelDeployment of VMs is growing at a very fast rate.In 2009, for the first time, virtual machine deployment overtook physical server shipments.Cloud deployment can follow one of three models

Private cloudPublic cloudHybrid cloud

Security takes a completely different dimension even in private cloud!

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The three modelsPrivate Cloud

Designed for, and access restricted to, a single enterprise which may be geographically split, or may be an extended enterpriseAn internal shared resource, not a commercial offeringIT org/dept is the ‘vendor’ of the shared resource

Public CloudThe cloud infrastructure is owned by an organization selling cloud services to the general public or to a large industry groupAdditionally (w.r.t. the private version) needs to tackle issues like security, availability, billing and metering etc

Hybrid CloudA mix of both 11

But why do I need Cloud?

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Five Essential CharacteristicsRapid Elasticity

Ability to scale resources both up and down as needed

Measured ServiceBilling, access control, resource optimization, capacity planning and other tasks

On-demand Self-serviceConsumer’s ability to use services as needed without any human intervention of any of the parties

Ubiquitous network accessCapabilities are available over the net and accessible through standard mechanisms

Resource poolingUses multi-tenant model to serve consumers 13

Situations that can benefit from Cloud Computing

Massive scale – computation, storage, …Heavy load variationNon-deterministic life-time (start ups)High reliability and availabilityWorld wide distributionCollaboration across company boundariesApplication do not fit to company core business

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Security mind set has to changeFundamental tenets of information security don’t change

Ensuring confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, access, and audit of information and workloads

Conventional data centers are secured usingFirewalling, IPS, IDS, digital signature, authentication etcPolicies are frequently tied to the physical attributes like IP address, MAC address, server etc.Delivered as siloed security product offerings

Need is for on-demand elastic servicesThe services need to be integrated into private cloud provisioning and management processesSecurity policy would be associated with workloads as they are provisioned, moved, modified, cloned and ultimately retiredIn essence, a transition from security as a set of products to security as a set of services 15

Cloud computing comes in three flavorsSoftware as a Service (SaaS)

The consumer uses an application, but does not control the operating system, hardware or network infrastructure on which it's running.

Platform as Service (PaaS)The consumer uses a hosting environment for their applications. The consumer controls the applications that run in the environment, but does not control the operating system, hardware or network infrastructure on which they are running.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)The consumer uses "fundamental computing resources" such as processing power, storage, networking components or middleware.

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Cloud architecture vis-a-vis XaaS

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‘Consumers’ are different

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Cost?IaaS

Examples: Amazon’s EC2, S3; Microsoft’s SQL AzureSQL Azure, a cloud database, charges $9.99 for a Web Edition, which comprises up to a 1 gigabyte relational database; and $99.99 for a Business Edition, which holds up to a 10 gigabyte relational database. EC2 charges per standard instances:

Small (Default): $0.085 per hour (linux/unix) $0.12 per hour (windows)Large: $0.34 per hour (linux/unix) $0.48 per hour (windows)Extra Large: $0.68 per hour (linux/unix) $0.96 per hour (windows)

PaaSExamples: Force.com, Google App Engine, Windows Azure (Platform)Azure provides database and platform services starting at $0.12 per hour for compute infrastructure; $0.15 per gigabyte for storage; and $0.10 per 10,000 transactions

SaaS: prices vary based on product; to be discussed later

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Cloud Taxonomy

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To be or not to be in Cloud: ConsiderationsEconomic aspects

Cost reductionPay per useImproved time to marketReturn on investmentCAPEX to OPEXGoing ‘green’

Non-functional aspectsElasticityReliabilityQuality of serviceAgility and adaptabilityAvailability

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Technological aspectsVirtualizationMulti-tenancySecurity, privacy and complianceData managementMeteringAPIs and / or Programming EnhancementsTools

Cloud computing benefit exampleA researcher at the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly needs to analyze a lot of data fast. If the results turn out as expected, the company could have a world-class success (and high profits) on its hands. But 25 servers are needed to crunch the huge volume of data!Scenario without Cloud Computing: wait till the purchase request is approved, till the servers arrive, till the servers are configured, etc. all of which can take several weeks or even several months, and substantial cost.Scenario with Cloud Computing: the researcher clicks over to Amazon Web Services, configures the 25 servers in the Cloud in one hour, and within two hours has crunched the data. Total fee for the time using Amazon’s resources? Just $89.

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Some more real-life examplesCoca-Cola Enterprises uses a Cloud-based system to streamline operations with merchandisers in the field;Nasdaq uses Amazon’s S3 Cloud Service to deliver historical stock and mutual fund information, rather than add the load to its own database and computing infrastructure;Animoto, a small start-up which decided to use Amazon's Cloud Services, was able to keep up with soaring demand for its service and scale up from 50 instances to 3,500 instances over a three day period;Times wanted to place scanned images covering a 60-year period (15 million news stories) online. The newspaper moved four terabytes into Amazon’s S3, ran all the software over a weekend on EC2 for $25, and then launched its product in a matter of minutes;Mogulus streams 120,000 live TV channels over the Internet and owns no hardware except for the laptops it uses. It handled all of the election coverage for most of the large media sites. Its CEO states that he could not be in business without IaaS.

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Some uncomfortable situationsThe massive capital investments Cloud Computing providers have made in their data centers, on hardware and software, on highly qualified personnel and so on, will not be generating revenue if customers leave, so customers may incur switching and migration costs.What if your Cloud provider disappears!

On Feb. 18, 2009, Coghead sent an e-mail to customers announcing it was ending its cloud-based development platform service immediately "due to the impact of economic challenges." ERP giant SAP bought Coghead's intellectual property but pulled the plug on the development platform, giving customers until April 30 to retrieve their applications and data.It took about 4.5 person-months for Shockey, founder and principal of Hekademia Consulting, to port his CRM application from Coghead to Intuit's QuickBase database.

In October 2009 1 million US users of the T-Mobile Sidekick mobile phone and emailing device lost data as a result of server failure at Danger, a company recently acquired by Microsoft 24

Benefits ascribed to the ‘Cloud’

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Challenges ascribed to the ‘Cloud’

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Last words about CloudNot everyone agrees, but McKinsey has concluded as follows. “Clouds already make sense for many small and medium-size businesses, but technical, operational and financial hurdles will need to be overcome before clouds will be used extensively by large public and private enterprises.”Additionally, remember:

Standards are immature and things change very rapidly in the cloud. All IaaS and SaaS providers use different technologies and different standards.Not all your current applications are Cloud-enabled!If you take an insecure application to the Cloud (either public or private), it won't become automatically secure!There are latency and performance issues. Latency, in general, is the period of time that one component in a system is wasting time waiting for another component.Integration of a cloud application with a legacy on-premise application may be a tough task! 27