Skip to main content

Cloud Computing: Hype, Vision or Reality?


The question in the title above was the key question raised by Pini Cohen STKI Vice President in a presentation in the 23th meeting of the SOA Forum of the Israeli Association of Information Processing. The meeting took place on December 30th in Afeka College Tel-Aviv.

The following sections summarize Pini's view on Cloud Computing:


Cloud Computing Basics

Cloud Computing delivers Data Center services via Internet on demand. The user is paying for the resources he is consuming and for the period of time he is using them.

The slide in the left side describes the four cloud service types layers.

Infrastructure as a Service provides resources such as storage for backups

Platform as a Service provides a platform and development environment for developing applications or SOA Services.

Software as a Service provides Applications or applicative Services.

Desktop as a Service provides Desktop Operating System of choice view based on Virtualized User Interface Services located in the Cloud Data Centers.

Service invocation is based on Web Services client in the Cloud user location and a Web Service provider in the Cloud.

Cloud Computing is based upon Grid, SOA and other technologies.

The implementation could be Multi-Tenants i.e. customers share a single machine instance or Single-Tenant i.e. a dedicated Virtual Machine for a customer.

Salesforce.Com Cloud provides Multi-Tenants implementation, while Serena software provides Single-Tenant services.



The second illustration classifies Cloud Computing vendors based on approach and user types. Traditional Infrastructure vendors' approach is more conservative than Web 2.0 vendors' approach.

Cloud Computing and IT

  • Cloud Computing and SOA represent a Business model change from Products to Services.
  • Currently it is immature therefore STKI analysts are not able to analyze it
  • It looks like a revolution which will change the way organizations and people use IT.
  • Technological Revolutions cycle time is 40 to 60 years. The cycle includes a crisis due to difficulties to adapt to the new technology. Right after the crisis a mass adoption of the revolutionary technologies and concepts is taking place
  • Cloud Computing emerging concurrently with the economical crisis. Probably it will dominate IT after the crisis.
  • Cloud Computing promises significant costs reduction. Infrastructure Costs could be 10% of current costs in traditional Data Centers.
  • Usage of Cloud Computing services is not risk free. The following list includes some of the significant challenges facing Cloud Computing users:

Security, Availability, Architecture and Integration.

Pini's presentation is accessible in SlideShare


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The mainframe: still alive and kicking

Recently, I was interviewed by  Pcon   (unfortunately the link points to an Hebrew only site) as part of debriefing on Legacy Systems.  Pcon is an Israeli company investigating IT topics by quoting professional articles and interviewing experts. They publish the results of the investigations including practical recommendations. This post is mainly about topics raised by me during the interview, but not included in the debriefing, which will be published.    What are Legacy Systems? The term Legacy Systems refers to old application systems and/or veteran technologies still in use.  Usually, the term Legacy Systems is associated with: 1. Mainframe Hardware e.g. IBM System z and its Operating Systems or Proprietary Servers and Operating Systems such as HP Alpha and OpenVMS Operating System, IBM AS/400 and OS/400   Operating System. 2. Development and Production Environments, e.g. COBOL , Natural and DBMS systems such as Adabas  ...
16 comments
Read more

Will Business and IT Aligned?

For decades we are talking about closing the gap between business and IT , but the gap is still as wide as it was. In the beginning of the ERP era, we focused on aligning Business Processes and Core Systems, but in most enterprises we failed. SOA was the next alignment promise: defining the SOA Services in Business boundaries instead of Technical boundaries, should narrow the gap. However, despite of SOA Business Value ( Agility and Reuse )  in most enterprises,  the large Business-IT Gap remained as large as it was.  The IT Community aimed at the next alignment attempt: SOA is technical and BPM is its Business related complement.  Will the current BPM based alignment attempt succeed? I do not know, but Nick Heath's article  titled: Stop doing what the vendors tell you, CIOs told , published in  Tech Republic , suggests that the root of the problem is not Technological .   Stop Doing What the vendors Tell You Nick Heath's article is based ...
11 comments
Read more

Vendors Survival: Will Software AG Survive until 2019?

This post is another post in the Vendors Survival series following posts on Microsoft , Google , HP , Sun and EMC . On July 14 th Software AG and IDS Scheer announced that Software AG is going to take over IDS Scheer . The intended acquisition is an opportunity to add another post in my Vendors Survival posts series. A brief history of Software AG Mainframe products Software AG is larger than any German software company except SAP . It was established in the Mainframe age (in 1969). I worked with many customers, who used and some of them are still using, its two flagship products Adabas and Natural . Although these products support many platforms, their main platform is IBM Mainframe. Adabas is a database and Natural is a development environment. Like other pairs of Database and Development Environment in the mainframe environment (e.g. Ideal and Datacom , Mantis and Supra) build by the same vendor, they are tied together. As a result, although it is possible t...
8 comments
Read more