Cloud Computing: Faster than ‘Internet Time’

‘Internet Time’ has become a popular catchphrase to denote rapid technological advancement and corresponding obsoleting of technology with equally fast paradigm shifts in the Computing Industry.

Cloud Computing has broken the speed barrier even of Internet Time. Barely known and nearly non-existent a decade ago, and only a buzzword several years back, Cloud Computing is now a well-understood paradigm and an established method of approaching computing problems. It is already supported by some robust (and even mature) software technologies.

Facts and figures support these assertions. Consider that in 2007, several hundred virtual computers were created on Amazon’s cloud service and in 2008, the number was up to well over 5,000. In 2009, that shot up to nearly 35,000 and veritably exploded in 2010, when 80,000 Amazon virtual computers were created. That’s exponential growth, and it continues to this day.

The paradigm has shifted; the Cloud is here.

The Bias of the Information Age

Buying, installing, and maintaining hardware, including operating systems, updates/patches, and doing ‘builds’, plus taking care of the power supply, connections, backup/restore, and security measures – all this sounds like a full-time job . . . and it is. That is the reason large companies have fully staffed ICT Departments and Data Centres. Even medium-sized companies who are serious about ICT have at least some heavy duty computing hardware and a few full-time technical employees.

Small companies learn from experience that after they buy a few computers they can progress to a LAN – that’s not too difficult. But scaling up from there is progressively more expensive, time-consuming and fraught with unpredictable pitfalls for all but skilled and experienced technical specialists.

How, then, can a small company even be competitive – let alone compete on an even footing – with large companies with respect to computing and information? Clearly, the Information Age favours large companies that can afford it while smaller companies – most SMEs – who cannot are left to flounder. That’s the bias of the Information Age.

The Cloud to the Rescue

The saviour in the Information Age is The Cloud and the watchword of the (digital) day is Ubiquity. The Cloud promotes ‘Ubiquitous Computing:’ Compute Anywhere, Anytime – no cables and no disk.

The underpinning vision of the Cloud is that the computers are (a) abstract and, as a result, (b) virtual. Consider ‘The Cloud’ shorthand for ‘Abstract, Virtual Computers’. Here’s how it works, very briefly.

With the advent of numerous wireless high-speed technologies, the device that operates or sends commands to the actual computer and the related hard-drive can be decoupled from that computer – this decoupling can be across thousands of miles spanning continents and oceans.

Consider a weather-related app on your iPhone. You ask it for a snapshot of weather in a particular geographical area. Your request is sent ‘through the ether’ to some computer in an unknown location. It is this computer that ‘pulls’ the weather-related data, does the number-crunching, and sends the result back to your iPhone. Presto! a split-second later you get your weather forecast with a topographical map, text, figures and possibly even animation.

Other than displaying the data, virtually none of the actual computing work was done on your iPhone. That was done on the Cloud.

In reality, the ‘Cloud’ comprises of arrays or racks of servers with redundancies in the form of in-house power supply, backup supply, extra hardware, and failover mechanisms housed in a secure facility with enormous bandwidth.

Paradigm Shift, Illustrated

The Cloud Computing Model eliminates the need for high upfront costs as capital expenditure, which medium-sized companies may find exorbitant and smaller companies may find prohibitive. Cloud Computing not only makes computing economical but, more than that, makes it possible: it puts as much computing power as you need because of its inexpensive ‘pay as you go’ model.

Consider a small boutique handicrafts store operated by two young friends. If they had wanted to set up an online catalogue and ordering system, say, in 2000, they would have had to have at least some computing power to initially build and test their software before transferring it to a hosting service. They would have needed hardware – probably a server and a couple of desktops – a licensed operating system, and other licensed applications, besides a tangle of wires and cables!

Even after their online catalogue would have gone live on a web-hosting service, they would have needed at least a laptop to monitor their sales and manage their application. That would have meant up-front costs of at least a few thousand dollars. And who would have paid the ‘Computer Guy’ and programmers?

Now, only an iPad is enough! These two friends can contract with a Cloud Services vendor and request an online catalogue-and-ordering system and a chunk of disk space. The cost? No more than $20 a month. (And the ‘Computer Guy’ comes included in the package!) All that the entrepreneurial friends need do is upload their products’ names, descriptions, photographs and prices from their iPad to their Cloud service catalogue app, tweak the look, and they’re ready to go. They do not need to even buy and connect a single cable!

The Cloud is cheap; the Cloud is cable-less.

Of Democracy and Menus

As illustrated above, the Cloud ‘democratizes’ the computing marketplace. ICT infrastructure and computing technology that was out of reach for small businesses is now acquirable with a couple of phone-calls or via online sign-up. Computing power and disk space is no object now; as such, you can compete on a nearly even footing with even the biggest firms.

The erstwhile have-nots of the Information Age now have a seat at the table. And with a seat at the table, comes a menu. Insulated from the nuts and bolts of hardware, computers, disks, databases, servers, routers – indeed, insulated from all the nuts and bolts of computing itself – all you need do is place your ‘order’ from a limited fixed-price menu of Cloud services.

This menu’s categories won’t be ‘Mutton’, ‘Poultry’, and ‘Rice’; rather, offerings will usually be categorized by Infrastructure, Platform and Application:—

1. Infrastructure Level: Disk space on the Cloud – this is a blank slate sized to your specs.
2. Platform Level: Development Environments – this can be Linux, Microsoft, or something else.
3. Application Level: Ready-to-go software – Blogs, Drop-boxes, Catalogues, Supply-Chain Management, and more.

If you want a good dinner, you shouldn’t have to build a restaurant, should you? With the Cloud, you can enter the restaurant and get a menu that gives you Maxim’s quality at McDonald’s prices! Ain’t democracy wonderful?

Get it Now!

Besides economics, cost and such, the Cloud Computing Model is also about time to production. Approach any Cloud vendor and you can get gobs and gobs of space now. You can get started now.

The trick is that major Cloud vendors almost always have redundant capacity on hand. That is partly a result of astute planning to meet anticipated demand and partly a result of the (technical) nature of the model itself: the model requires for Cloud vendors to have an excess of capacity and also includes a magician’s box of technical tricks that converts a fixed amount of ‘real’ space into ten times that amount of ‘virtual’ space.

This ‘get it now’ criterion of the Cloud Model is a powerful attraction.

This attribute of the Cloud Model also allows for fast ‘upsizing’. Traditionally, companies have needed to plan ‘rollouts’ at least three months in advance to accomodate an ongoing or expected upsurge in data or computing activity . . . and the key words in the previous sentence are not even ‘three months’ – they are ‘at least’ and ‘to plan’! But now, any company – large or small – that has a Cloud Model can ask for their database size to be doubled, a new virtual server to be added, or their upload/download limits to be trebled. The vendor will usually do the needful within 24 hours.

In these respects, Cloud Computing is a game changer: there are no ‘at leasts’ and there are no ‘to plans’. You want it now? You’ll get it now!

Old Concepts, New Twists

Conceptually, the Cloud is anything but new; it is only the latest implementation of a good old communitarian concept: that of the shared ‘Pool’. One can relate the decades-old concept of a ‘pool’ and the practice of ‘pooling resources’ to the Cloud.

The corporate ‘typing pool’ of bygone days and the neighbourhood ‘car pool’ from the post-Oil Shock days is analogous to the Cloud. In the Cloud Model, computing resources are pooled to minimize cost and maximize value and, thus, bring benefit to all ‘poolers’.

—The Cloud Model is a Computer Pool.

The Cloud is also the newest manifestation of that old-fashioned thing: a utility.

Consider that little more than a century back electricity was not a utility but a capital investment for factories. They used to buy and maintain their own electricity generators and mini power plants. As time went on, electrical power began to be provided by a specialized local or regional power-supply plant, and electricity became a utility.

The Cloud revolution has brought about the ‘Utilitisation’ of computing power – computing power now joins electrical power, gas, and cable/satellite as a ‘Utility’. Within a a few years your Cloud Computing bill will be seen as just another utility bill and ‘CloudSpace’ will be as much a necessity and a way of life as electricity, gas, and cable/satellite.

TIME’s Person of the Year?

TIME Magazine’s well-known Person of the Year award is based on different factors; newsworthiness, paradigm shifts, game-changing capability are some of them. In general, impact on the way we live and perceive our world.

This honour has occasionally been awarded to non-persons – inanimate objects. Most famously and pertinently, this has been ‘The Computer’ in 1982 (besides ‘The Endangered Earth’ in 1988).

Given these facts, it’s not a bad bet that in a year or two, TIME’s Person of the Year may be . . . ‘The Cloud’.

Copyright © Kersasp Shekhdar 2012 for Kuakawa Solutions; All Rights Reserved

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