Cloud Computing: Different Perspectives

Will Venters

Cloud Computing
Gartner: a style of computing where massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided as a service using Internet technologies to multiple external customers Werner Vogels:

CTO/VP of Amazon : This This elasticity of resources, without and a misses Pay per use paying premium for large scale,demand is unprecedented in on
the history of IT (Armbrust et al 2009).
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The cloud service provider

Different styles of offering

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Profit Models
Google Model: Produce it and they will come Value out of meta-information mining reality Advertising Pay-per-use Licensing Managed Service Aligned products - value-add

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Cloud Providers: IaaS / PaaS

Aim for high utilisation ... Multi-tenanted and so large data centres. Benefit from Economies of Scale. Must load-balance across industries/applications (electricity utilities)... Profit by statistical multiplexing of services. Must provide requisite SLA.

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The Corporate / Government

Nature of Corporate Computing

Lots of servers (e.g. Government has ~9000 server rooms) Low server utilisation. Silos of application stacks and much replication. Software licence issues and costly procurement. 70% to 80% of their budgets go to maintenance (Rittig 2007). Capital Expenditure harder to justify in current economy than operating expenditure.

But McKinsey notes typical data-centers can operate at lower cost than required to outsource to Amazon EC2.

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Hollowing out IT Departments

In the long run the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least not in its familiar form. It will have little left to do once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private datecentres and into the cloud. Business units and even individual employees will be able to control the processing of information directly, without the legions of technical specialists (N.Carr 2009 p118)
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Corporate-Cloud Issues
Costs: entry, ongoing, exit (Stallmans trap lockin/interoperability). Trust: viability of partners, traditional Outsourcing challenges Security: Private Clouds, Virtual Private clouds, Physical risks of consolidated data-centres, 99.95 vs. 99.99 Policy: Legal jurisdiction, Regulation(SarbanesOxley/HIPPAA), IT-Forensics. Expertise: Role of Consultants as enablers of Cloud Services, Customer-care issues.
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Themes in Corporate Cloud

Data, data, data. Green IT Testing new ideas. Converting data-centres to Private-Clouds and thus having transparent TCO for business units. Developing World (BrIC) SMEs and Startup (e.g. using Business Analytics) Mashups Ambidextrous Organisations (e.g. Guardian Newspapers and MP expenses) New organisational forms and Virtual Organisations.
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But there is a legacy 5 Billion lines of COBOL code are written a year Paul Daugherty, Chief Technology Architect, Accenture, October 2009.

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GridPP Perspective

GridPP and the Cloud

Opportunity for a new language of eScience Lessons from the GridPP for Cloud users/providers? New models of collaboration for community cloud development (G-cloud etc.) Lessons for corporates attacking large dataanalytics and reality-mining.

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Questions?
w.venters@lse.ac.uk pegasus.lse.ac.uk utilitycomputing.wordpress.com

Further Reading
Aluetta, K. (2010). Googled: The end of the world as we know it London, Virgin books. Armbrust, M., A. Fox, et al. (2009). Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing, UC Berkeley Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory. Bandyopadhyay, Subhajyoti, Marston, Sean R., Li, Zhi and Ghalsasi, Anand, Cloud Computing: The Business Perspective (November 23, 2009). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1413545 Carr, N. (2005). "The End of Corporate Computing." MIT Sloan Management Review 46(3): 67-73. Carr, N. (2008). The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, W. W. Norton & Co. Natis, Y., E. Knipp, et al. (2009). Who's Who in Application Platforms for Cloud Computing: The Cloud Specialists. Research, Gartner. Weinhardt, C., A. Anandasivam, et al. (2009). "Cloud Computing A Classification, Business Models, and Research Directions." Business & Information Systems Engineering 1(5): 391399. Yang, H. and M. Tate (2009). Where are we at with Cloud Computing. 20th Australasian Conference on Information Systems, Melbourne.

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