Which way is the Cloud blowing?
Whatever we may think and however much or how little we believe the marketing hype, Cloud computing offers benefits to both users and providers - which cannot be achieved in any other way. The take-up of Cloud may not have been as instant as some would have liked us to believe in the early days, but it is unquestionably the way the world has been going, and will continue to go.
In our last article on Cloud technology, we made the point that the real change is not the concept of Cloud that is new - but the mass availability of low cost fibre communications, and hence the ability for remote hosting, which is making the difference to the way people work. Cloud hosting provides scalability on demand, in a way which would never otherwise be economic for some applications.
For example, let’s take a social media application that is centred around individual television programmes. The computing power and traffic requirements are small when a television programme is not being transmitted, but very high for a short period when it is. The application operator knows when the demand will be required, and can spool up the necessary computing power just in advance - then spool it down again afterwards, and leave enough running in the background to cope with on-demand users.
For the operator to do this on their own machines, it would require capacity to cope with the peak, but with each machine spending most of its time unused. And so, for such an application - the advent of shared, scalable Cloud computing is the difference between an economically viable application and no application at all.
The advent of virtualisation means that the computing power available in a modern server no longer needs to be dedicated as a single machine, and instead it can operate as multiple machines. Typically, a virtualised server in a Cloud environment operates as eight virtualised servers - depending on the workload and other parameters - and appears to eight user applications as though each was running on its own server. To user applications, it is completely scalable and yields seemingly infinite computing power, almost instantly whenever needed.
Having said that, not every application translates directly and easily to remote hosting. Most suitable are applications which are not time-critical, and which involve relatively few and relatively small transactions between the user machine and the remote host. A good example is a Customer Relations Management (CRM) system, where the user spends a lot of time on their machine but mostly sends or retrieves only small text files - and only at the speed they needs to do so. Response times are not critical - so if a retrieval often takes under a second, but sometimes takes five seconds, the user will accept that. It is no coincidence that one of the early successes of Cloud hosting was Salesforce.com, which operates in exactly that way.
