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 23^th meeting of the SOA Forum of the Israeli Association of Information Processing. The meeting took place on December 30^th 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