Cloud Computing News

I came across another piece of article on cloud computing. There is indeed differences between cloud computing and grid computing. This article describe more to be done to cloud computing as that had been done with grid computing. Surprisingly, the industry is waiting and seeing how Google is going to take this cloud computing onwards. Hmm... that's interesting.

Cloud Computing Needs Rainmakers

In the early 1990s, a new computing architecture known as “grid computing” was conceived. The term itself is a metaphor that refers to making computing power as easy to access as the electrical power grid. The three originators of the grid computing concept (Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman, and Steve Tueche) went on to lead the creation of the Globus Toolkit, a collection of Open Source Software (OSS) tools that can be used to build and manage computing grids. To this day the toolkit is a robust OSS project with new releases planned and many success stories behind it. A true computing grid has the following three properties:

1. There is no central administration of computing resources.
2. The grid uses open standards.
3. The grid can guarantee “quality of service” rather than “best effort”.

Cloud computing is a new term that refers to a subset of grid computing, and represents an alternative to having local servers or personal devices handling users’ applications. In general, the cloud is meant to represent the Internet, so cloud computing suggests that functionality comes from the Internet rather than any specific identifiable computing device. Also central to the idea is that management tasks are automated; if the system requires human intervention to allocate processes to computing resources then it’s not a cloud, it’s only a data center.

Perhaps the single greatest advantage of cloud computing is that it easily handles peak load situations without the need for additional hardware infrastructure that will spend most of its time underutilized. Resources can be virtualized and presented to the customer as virtual servers which the customers themselves manage. Physically, the resources might span multiple computers or even multiple data centers.

A well known implementation of cloud computing is the “Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud”, which allows customers to create, lauch and terminate virtual server instances on demand. Pricing is based on The number of instance-hours where an “instance” represents the equivalent computing power of a standard configuration of physical system. Data transfer is also priced by the gigabyte. All utilization is done through a collection of Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) which provide a standard platform for developers. The Amazon ECC is a well designed robust cloud computing environment which most experienced developers can take advantage of.

I believe that cloud computing is here to stay, but also that it will have slow growth at first. The slow growth is partly due to a large installed user base of data centre servers which would be difficult to port to the cloud, and partly due to general discomfort with hosting the company’s data on someone else’s hardware. In fact, Canadian law requires that for certain types of data (such as health records), the data must be hosted on machines that are physically located within the national boundaries. The reason given by the government for this is simple: The U.S. Patriot Act. Placing physical limitations on where data can be located in many ways defeats the purpose of a computing cloud.

As usual, the big players in the industry have all been pretty much stuck for a while, so for now they are all watching to see how Google is going to push the edges again. It will be particularly interesting to see if Google tackles the toughest part of the problem: integrating the cloud with mobile devices (you thought I was going to say the online/offline issue didn’t you?) This is something they are positioning themselves to take on with Android, their (relatively) new mobile platform.

It will take a few years, but eventually cloud computing will reach critical mass and really take off in terms of popular use. In the process, it will make a lot of Internet empires, and a lot of empires bigger; the developers and companies that are able to build applications that seamlessly integrate the cloud with desktop computing and mobile devices will make the first fortunes made. The ones which bring ease of use to the end consumer are the ones that will really turn clouds into rainmakers.

source :- http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/idol/2008/06/07/cloud-computing-needs-rainmakers/

Cloud Computing - What is it?

A term I came across why searching for news and material on grid computing. So being naturally curious I just got to see what is this thing called cloud computing.

Thus this brings me to this website : http://www.sys-con.com/read/584958.htm

This website has got a good definition of Grid computing, cloud computing and much more. And I reproduce the definition here. The author of the article had done some up a good summary of the definitions taken from Wikipedia.

* Grid Computing - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing
o Multiple independent computing clusters which act like a “grid” because they are composed of resource nodes not located within a single administrative domain. (formal)
o Offering online computation or storage as a metered commercial service, known as utility computing, computing on demand, or cloud computing.
o The creation of a “virtual supercomputer” by using spare computing resources within an organization.

* Cloud Computing - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
o Cloud computing is a computing paradigm shift where computing is moved away from personal computers or an individual application server to a “cloud” of computers. Users of the cloud only need to be concerned with the computing service being asked for, as the underlying details of how it is achieved are hidden. This method of distributed computing is done through pooling all computer resources together and being managed by software rather than a human.
o The services being requested of a cloud are not limited to using web applications, but can also be IT management tasks such as requesting of systems, a software stack or a specific web appliance.

* Utility Computing - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_computing :
o Conventional Internet hosting services have the capability to quickly arrange for the rental of individual servers, for example to provision a bank of web servers to accommodate a sudden surge in traffic to a web site.
o “Utility computing” usually envisions some form of virtualization so that the amount of storage or computing power available is considerably larger than that of a single time-sharing computer. Multiple servers are used on the “back end” to make this possible. These might be a dedicated computer cluster specifically built for the purpose of being rented out, or even an under-utilized supercomputer. The technique of running a single calculation on multiple computers is known as distributed computing.

* Distributed Computing - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing
o A method of computer processing in which different parts of a program are run simultaneously on two or more computers that are communicating with each other over a network. Distributed computing is a type of segmented or parallel computing, but the latter term is most commonly used to refer to processing in which different parts of a program run simultaneously on two or more processors that are part of the same computer. While both types of processing require that a program be segmented—divided into sections that can run simultaneously, distributed computing also requires that the division of the program take into account the different environments on which the different sections of the program will be running. For example, two computers are likely to have different file systems and different hardware components.

Do drop by the above site for more details explanation. They have got a fantastic diagrams illustrating how each system works.