Oct 7th, 2009 |
It’s certain that you’ve heard about Cloud Computing in one form or another by now. I’m certainly a victim of the cloud frenzy in that Curtis Franklin and I are writing a book on it for CRC Press. What I would like to add to the buzzing is that Clouds should also feel familiar too. After all, what we’re seeing is a cycle turning back from distributed chaos computing and heading back towards centralization in one form or another.
In the beginning the glass houses had their high priests dressed alike in white lab coats all servicing the alter of the information deities. However, the masses found that those cute little personal computers could run this thing called a spreadsheet and allow them to do “what if scenarios” like there was no tomorrow. So in went the first nail in the proverbial mainframe coffin. Well everything in life seems to be cyclical…I mean the kids are wearing clothes that I remember from the 60’s and paisley is back for heaven’s sake!
So getting to the point, the trends we’re seeing towards moving back to big centralized systems can be attributed to a great number of things. The ones that I can see are:
(1) Energy, moving smaller single purpose machines out of the department into more efficient virtualized blade servers means we can take advantage of higher efficiencies in power and cooling.
(2) Human Resource costs, the care and feeding of these system ain’t cheap and more and more companies are looking at moving their gear into colocation or cloud services so that their IT folks can concentrate on business issues rather than just the care and feeding of servers.
(3) Federation and how more and more organizations want to enable a trust relationship for things like supply chain management, but need some neutral ground. The cloud services and especially the ability to easily have server processes talking to each other (i.e. Amazon’s SQS aka Simple Queue Services) even if they’re not in the same virtual or physical machine.
One of the Interop Team Members recently went through a migration from their in-house data center for development over to the Amazon EC2 system. His advice was:
Erik Cummings as past InteropNET Head Engineer and previously of Pathworks Erik punctuates that he’s already been through the process of moving to Amazon’s Cloud Services and his major comment is: “…Having recently designed a platform SaaS application - and having gone and said “cloud computing is AWESOME and we’ll need to do it soon, but not now!” - the biggest concern in SLA terms I have is ALL ABOUT troubleshooting.
For mature applications and systems where I understand and am
Familiar with the performance profile and bottlenecks, then SLA’s and Cloud computing sounds good - in a fledgling, new, unknown application - well - I need to be able to tune and manage and report on too many parts of the system - cloud computing hides too many details for me to effectively build and develop a growing solution.…”
The gist is that you really want to do your troubleshooting in your own environment. It certainly won’t be easy to do it in the clouds. So perhaps your migration path should include some in-house development resources as you get ready to setup house in the clouds.
