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I hear about vendors and service providers talking about virtualization, cloud computing, grid computing, and utility computing on a daily basis. Now throw in terms like unified computing from vendors like Cisco and you have a recipe for confusion in the marketplace. Staff members at my own company sometimes mix up terms like grid computing and cloud computing. And many marketing departments from traditional service providers take great liberties with these terms.
Virtualization is not cloud computing.
I hate to break it to ya but virtualization isn’t cloud computing. Virtualization is nothing more than a brick in the cloud computing house. It’s purely an infrastructure component. I don’t think it is necessarily even a requirement for a cloud computing infrastructure. Cloud computing abstracts computing resources from hardware from the perspective of the end user. You can’t just stand up a couple vmware servers and claim that you now have a cloud. I know vmware and some service providers would like you to believe that.
Grid computing is not cloud computing.
I’m probably going to upset some of the “grid hosting” providers out there when I say that their notion of a grid is marketechture at best. You can find true grid computing in academic circles and high-performance computing environments. Grid computing requires specialized architectures and purposefully written software applications that can run on distributed systems. You can’t run your Windows application on a grid. Think Beowulf clusters. Grid hosting marketechture is nothing more than a group of individual servers running hypervisors that are on the same vlan. These servers, and the computing resources they represent, are effectively silos.
ASP (application service provider) is not cloud computing.
Some vendors have related cloud computing to the ASP-model over the past year — usually in a dismissive tone. Their belief is that cloud computing is just another name for ASP 2.0. The big difference between cloud computing and the ASP model is that the cloud is designed to host a generic class of applications whereas the ASP model is purposely designed to handle specific applications. For example, the Amazon or Rackspace clouds can host an infinite set of applications. Whereas Microsoft Hosted Services are designed to provide rental of specific applications like Microsoft Exchange. You could say that Microsoft’s hosted services live in the “cloud”. But you would be hard pressed to say that this type of service makes Microsoft a cloud computing provider.
The Internet is not cloud computing.
I’ve seen this analogy creep into vendor-speak over the past year. Technical people traditionally referred to the Internet as the “cloud”. In fact many of us would literally draw a cloud when sketching out a network infrastructure connected to the Internet. So the thinking goes that if you connect a computer server to the Internet you now offer computing in the cloud — or cloud computing. This analogy ignores the business model and processes offered by cloud computing and focuses solely on infrastructure. See the “virtualization is not cloud computing” rant above. It is absolutely possible to build a cloud computing environment that is not connected to the Internet.
Utility computing could be cloud computing.
Utility computing is probably the closest traditional definition to what we call cloud computing today. Utility computing is defined as the packaging of computing resources as a metered service similar to a public utility. Utility computing allows the customer to rent resources versus paying for the acquisition of computing servers. This definition sounds awfully close to cloud computing. Cloud computing could be called utility computing 2.0. I’ll cover this more in the future.
Cloud hosting infrastructures have a number of unique advantages over traditional dedicated infrastructures. One of those advantages, a key part of any cloud infrastructure model, is the utility pricing model. Here’s a key point to understand: the customer always overpays for infrastructure and never underpays when using traditional hosting. Traditional hosters oversubscribe infrastructure such as bandwidth and storage. Customers pay for bandwidth and storage reservations as part of their selected hosting package. They also pay for any overages beyond their infrastructure reservations. In other words, a customer pays for a reserved amount of bandwidth or storage whether or not they are actually using that infrastructure. In the cloud model the customer only pays for the infrastructure they consume. They can scale the infrastructure up or down as the needs dictate. In many cases the infrastructure unit pricing goes down as the customer’s needs scale up.
Several big announcements rained down from the Internet clouds over the past few days. Amazon announced support for Microsoft Windows in their EC2 cloud. They will support both the Windows OS (AD, IIS, .NET, etc) and SQL Server. Additionally they are providing a 99.95% uptime SLA for their services. This is a respectable goal for a cloud hosting service.
Microsoft, not to be outdone, announced their own cloud computing offering called Azure. We all knew that Microsoft was working on a cloud hosting service over the past year. It’s nice to finally hear some of the details. Microsoft’s service is initially geared towards developers but it’s not hard to see that small businesses are the next likely target. Microsoft provides additional support in the cloud for technologies like Microsoft Dynamics, Sharepoint, and Live.
Someone recently asked me the question: “Are clouds going to compete with dedicated hosting services?” My response was both yes and no. Cloud hosting from Amazon and Microsoft will definitely compete with unmanaged dedicated hosters like The Planet and SoftLayer. Cloud hosting is nothing more than virtualized Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). I also think cloud hosting will directly compete with smaller datacenter colocation deals. Think about it. If you are a company looking to colo half-a-dozen servers at a datacenter you could save significant capex and infrastructure headaches by using virtual servers in a cloud. Plus you could take advantage of the global business continuity features of a large cloud.
I don’t believe clouds will compete with managed hosting providers — yet. The simple reason is that cloud hosters don’t provide server management. They are purely infrastructure plays with some cool APIs. I’m sure some smart group of people is thinking about building a managed services business on top of a cloud platform. You just need the technical talent, marketing, and luck.
