History & Myths of Cloud Computing by Jim Stikeleather

Cloud Computing History and Myths

Jim Stikeleather

Chief Innovation Officer

Global Marketing

The Evolution of the Cloud

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MULTICS

OSI Model

DCE Model

COBRA

Grid Computing

Parallel Computing

Cloud Technology has a long and convoluted family tree, bringing us to today’s concepts of Cloud Computing.

Cloud ComputingVector ComputingVector Computing

Super Computing

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The End Game

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Most of the industry focuses on the economics of cloud computing as the primary benefit even though the evolutionary trail sees it as a side effect

An anticipated side effect of this would be reduced costs, because if done, a person should be able to leverage resources across multiple-use cases much more readily

The end game of this evolution has been how to separate the elements of the workload and apply the maximum amount of resources (generally CPU's) against it to reduce the elapsed time to completion

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Case-In-Point Parallelism & Leveraged Resources

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The Times had a large collection of high-resolution scanned images of its historical newspapers, spanning 1851 to 1922.

They wanted to process this set of images into individual articles in PDF format.

They even did it twice since they discovered an error in the process the first time.

The Times was able to use 100 servers for 24 hours at the low standard price of 10 cents an hour per server.If they had purchased even a single server for this task, the likely cost would have exceeded $890 for just the hardware, and they also would have needed to consider the cost of administration, power, and cooling. In addition, the processing would have taken more than three months with one server.

One of the most cited examples of this comes from

The total cost of using 100 EC2 instances, they were able to finish the processing in 24 hours

$890

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Myth #1:There is “The Cloud”

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There is no one Cloud – Yet

The term “Cloud” has been hijacked by marketing departments and distorted until there was confusion as to what cloud actually means

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Each of these companies uses

very different technologies to

provide their clouds.

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Which Would You Rather Have Perform Your Surgery?

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The two descriptions convey radically different amounts of information. In the same way, saying you want to put an application in the “cloud” is also meaningless. Much more detail is required about both the target “cloud” and the target application.

A female Astronaut with a PhD in astrobiology and an MD with a specialty in cardiovascular surgery?

A Mammal?OR

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Properties of “Cloud”

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A “Cloud” Exhibits Certain Properties Regardless of the Underlying Technology:

On-demand services Metered Scalable

There is no need for up-front “order taking,” and there is minimal delay between requesting services and acquiring service.

Payment (or chargeback) is based upon some form of usage metric (consumption over time period) that is dynamic (can vary during the time period) and reasonably fine grained (not a major step function).

The consumption and delivery pattern can grow or shrink dynamically, usually tied to the specific metrics of the offering.

There are other characteristics used by the industry, often driven by the assumption of one vendor serving multiple customers (resource pooling, broad network access, etc.). However, these three properties serve as a good acid test for all proposed cloud implementations, internal or external.

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Myth #2:Any Application can Run in “The Cloud”

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The Answer is Both Yes… and No

It depends on the application and the technologiesinvolved in thespecific cloud.

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The Answer is Both Yes… and No

Most applications today cannot take full, or even minimal, advantage of the capabilities of these utility technologies without being rewritten

Specifically, the applications have to be written using either a stateless or RESTful(Representational State Transfer) architecture

Only then will applications be dynamically scalable, workload migratable, location independent, and inherently fault tolerant

Until an application is rewritten, it is constrained as to what “cloud” offering environment it can execute in

Many applications can be moved into this type of environment with the following critical caveats:

Many applications require very specific types of I/O capabilities that may or may not be able to be virtualized. If not, then the application cannot execute in “the cloud”

Many applications require very specific hardware (i.e., NAS versus SAN) and if so, then they can only run in virtualized environments that have that hardware and perhaps only if access to that hardware bypasses the virtualization capability, effectively neutralizing the potential leverage and sharing of that hardware

Any application with real time or near-real time performance requirements (i.e., high volume transaction processing) will likely fail in most existing cloud technology today

It depends on the application and the technologies involved in the specific cloud.

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The Answer is Both Yes… and No

Regardless of the implementing technologies concerning a specific cloud, there is an underlying goal of the movement towards cloud computing and making IT function similarly to the electric grid – as in, plug into the wall and go

The fundamental commercial “cloud” offering today is an IaaS(Infrastructure-as-a-Service) based upon virtualization technology, making one server behave like many servers and allowing multiple applications that need dedicated servers to actually share a server

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Myth #3:Cloud Offerings are Highly Segmented

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3 Types of Cloud Offerings

There are really only 3 types of “cloud” offerings

All the other “as-a-Service” offerings you read about –such as Storage-as-a-Service, Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service, etc. – are specific versions of one of these three.

IaaS(Infrastructure-as-a-Service)

#1

PaaS(Platform-as-a-Service)

#2

SaaS(Software-as-a-Service)

#3

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IaaS

• IaaS is what the name implies: a virtual infrastructure that stands in for a real infrastructure, theoretically at a better price,

performance, quality, and functionality point. The key point is the mapping to the real infrastructure. The virtual infrastructure is constrained to the capabilities of the real infrastructure it is “simulating.” If the IaaS does not support SAN, then the application cannot require a SAN.

• IaaS is generally not micro-scalable, which means the IaaS is generally consumed in terms of its real counterparts (e.g., number of processor cores, GB of memory).

– The Amazon EC3 is the best example of this: one selects from a menu of servers, system software, and storage. This is effectively a SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) model.

– Other vendors offer similar SKUs with the added ability to build custom virtual infrastructures (the industry often uses the term “private cloud”) but not at the SKU costs.

– This is the model of the current Dell Services cloud – very specific configurations of hardware and software for specific prices. Also, Dell can create a custom IaaS but at a custom cost.

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Networking

Servers

Storage

Infrastructure

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PaaS

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• PaaS providers, such as Microsoft Azure, Salesforce.com,

Google, and Joyent, basically provide a one-size-fits-all offering, with volume discounts and other pricing options.

• They do this because, in general, they make the hardware and system software totally invisible and inaccessible to the customer, with no choice in operating system, database system, transaction processing engine, etc. Applications have to be developed in and execute in their architecture and system software. Customers are allowed to develop in the PaaS environment, but the evolution is for third-party vendors to create SaaSbased upon the vendor’s PaaS. In effect, there is one basic SKU with some add-ons such as Disaster Recovery or higher Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

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SaaS

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Files

Databases

E-mail

Rich Content

AppsSaaS providers are yet one more step up in abstraction of

the underlying technologies in that they offer turnkey applications that generally run on someone else’s IaaS or PaaS, with

Salesforce.com and Google Apps being the exceptions. Customers have no access to the application code, though sometimes there are tailoring and reporting capabilities through some type of configuration management.

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Cloud Architectures

Each of these three forms of cloud offerings can be stand-alone or built on top of one another, as seen here

Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud Infrastructure

IaaS

PaaS

SaaS

PaaS

SaaSSaaS

PaaS

IaaS

PaaS

IaaS

Software as a Service (SaaS)Architectures

Platform as a Service (PaaS)Architectures

Infrastructure as a Service

(IaaS)Architectures

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Demonstrating our commitment to next-generation solutions that are open, capable, and affordable

Cloud Computing and Dell

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Dell is broadly engaged with cloud computing technology to open opportunities and to help customers make the best choice for their situation

Our goal is to help customers avoid the pitfalls and to capture the promise of cloud computing. We will continue to expand our thinking and our capabilities in this area to help our customers understand and appropriately apply this evolving model of information technology

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Thank You

Jim StikeleatherChief Innovation [email protected]