GMO Cloud

Living with a cloud – paradigm shift in the way we work Part 3

In this third post in this series, I will discuss abstraction more in detail. The objective here is to ultimately lead to convergence of user and the technology.

Driving the cloud engine

Carrying forward the analogy of a car driver, let’s look at cloud adaptation. Assuming that an organization has not committed itself completely to the cloud, but has a mixed portfolio of online infrastructure – some dedicated servers and a bit of cloud services. Like I have said earlier, large enterprises like to move slowly and with reason. As such, the earlier order of things was organized, in the sense that dedicated servers were reserved for specific activities. As a result, one part of the enterprise did not know what the others were doing, though infrastructure may have been controlled centrally by the technology group. Everyone was happy with this setup.

Cloud Changes The Order

Enter the cloud and there is bound to be disruption in the way things are organized. There are no dedicated servers reserved for a specific activity and this means relinquishing control of infrastructure. Moreover, management has to get used to driving the car without really understanding what is happening under the hood. This may look like a simple problem but the psychological effect can be devastating. Not knowing the mechanism of operation is something the management has the live with. This is an abstraction layer which the cloud has unwittingly introduced into the system. Instead of giving instructions to the driver, the management itself has taken over the wheel. It will take time for management to adjust to the new way of doing things.

The cloud abstraction

There is no doubt that the cloud will win. Meanwhile, managements are going to struggle with the changed order due to the introduction of cloud. The management will be forced to become the driver which is great for enterprises. They can now focus on their primary activity – that of selling their products and services rather than spending enormous amount of time managing the infrastructure. This is where a paradigm shift in the role of management will occur. Those organizations which successfully maneuver their mindset and way of working will transition smoothly into the cloud, leading to massive savings in infrastructure costs. Looking at it from a different angle, those organizations which try to balance the old way of working with the new will totter. Neither will they be able to fully absorb the new management culture, nor will they save from redundancies created in their technical setup. This is where organizations need to focus. A reorientation and revamping of roles within the management must happen along with adaptation of cloud technology.

Facilitating the changeover

Here I foresee the emergence of a new breed of consultants. They would facilitate enterprises to appreciate and adapt to operations which are more abstract and happen under the hood. There is no reason for the drivers to know the mechanism but yet feel completely in control. What happens if their motor stalls during their journey? They would do the same as you would, if your car stalls – call the mechanic.

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Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

About the Guest Author:

Sankarambadi Srinivasan, ‘Srini’, is a maverick writer, technopreneur, geek and online marketing enthusiast rolled into one. He began his career as a Naval weapon specialist. Later, he sold his maiden venture and became head of an offshore Database administration company in Mumbai. He moved on as Chief Technology Officer of one of the largest online entities, where he led consolidation of 300 online servers and introduced several Web 2.0 initiatives. He holds a Master’s degree in Electronics and Telecommunication.

Living with a cloud – paradigm shift in the way we work Part 2

Continuing from my last post, it’s clear that there is a colossal wastage of resources with respect to server utilization – both from the point of view of individual companies and in the universal sense. One of the solutions was to create smaller server units with better efficiency and advanced technology.

Case of large organizations

The battle of in-house resources versus that of a Data Center is quite old. I remember the days when email servers were usually hosted in individual offices. For those with multiple offices spanning the globe, this posed a serious problem. Those tied to Microsoft technology were further hampered by restrictive policies.
Typically a large organization would spread their requirement over a thousand servers, each running at 30 to 40% efficiency. As long as there was no visible wastage, most management either overlooked the inefficiency or simply bore with it because the tech guys did not seem to have any other solution. There was always the danger of the entire IT infrastructure collapsing due to overloading. No one could take chances and therefore status quo was maintained.

Managing on line infrastructure resources

It was not that organizations suffered this inefficiency without waging a battle. Many in-house technologies mushroomed to counter server underutilization. Clustering was one such solution. Load Balancing techniques were refined. However, the need for physical infrastructure remained and with it came the concomitant wastage.

The world of virtualization

Virtualization is a brilliant concept where the physical layer of implementation was separated from the user with a software layer. Using this technology, you can use a single resource to run multiple operations as if each user owned the resource independently. If I remember correctly, the animation industry picked up virtualization first with gusto. Each animation workstation was directly linked with the datacenter for executing operations which were resource intensive. Pooling of infrastructure led to better efficiency. Essentially, clustering was a major breakthrough in animation industry.

Enter the cloud

The next logical step was obviously the cloud. There is a difference between virtualization and cloud computing which is not the subject under review here. Suffice to say that the virtualization concept was carried forward to give birth to cloud computing. Here, I would like to illuminate readers about the fact that not all clouds are the same. The principles may be identical but implementation differs. AWS of Amazon is different from Microsoft offering. The perceived efficiency also varies from vendor to vendor. Though there are no standards as such, the basic building block of a cloud is a server instance. This may comprise of a CPU, memory and some cases a separate database.

The advent of abstraction

The cloud is an abstraction layer which separates the user from the infrastructure. There is a beautiful way in which this has been explained by some geek. Imagine that you are driving a car. You switch the ignition and start the car and rest automatically happens. If you were to understand or comprehend the working of gears and machine and how the gears engage the engine, you would never be able to drive the car. There is an abstraction layer which separates you, the driver, from the actual working of the car. In the case of a car, you can pick up a reputable brand and sleep in peace. Now this brings us to the question of how to evaluate the cloud engine which you would be driving?

Be Part of Our Cloud Conversation

Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

About the Guest Author:

Sankarambadi Srinivasan, ‘Srini’, is a maverick writer, technopreneur, geek and online marketing enthusiast rolled into one. He began his career as a Naval weapon specialist. Later, he sold his maiden venture and became head of an offshore Database administration company in Mumbai. He moved on as Chief Technology Officer of one of the largest online entities, where he led consolidation of 300 online servers and introduced several Web 2.0 initiatives. He holds a Master’s degree in Electronics and Telecommunication.

Living with a cloud – paradigm shift in the way we work

Cloud services are viewed mostly in isolation, as if they were a technological feat transforming the computing world, yet have no direct link to our everyday life. The perception, even among the most knowledgeable, is that cloud is inaccessible except by the geeks working silently in a top secret cabin, out of bound for the normal folks like us. It reminds me of the days of DOS, when only a few techies worked on highly secretive PC’s. It took less than a decade for the same PC to invade every nook and corner of our life. The cloud phenomenon is exactly the same.
In the next four posts I will take a look at how the cloud is slowly becoming a universal phenomenon rather than a mere technical tool.

The business of leasing and cloud

Leasing is perhaps one of the oldest business practices. In fact, management books are full of case studies involving decision making on buy or lease options. Both have a place in business. Buying capital goods or equipment requires money upfront which many companies could not afford. Leasing was an attractive option for these entities. Businesses leased complete factories with equipment and personnel. It must be understood that leasing business was dependent on the life of the machines. Typically, factory equipment would have a life of twenty five years. New generations of machines were developed once in a decade and obsolescence was never an issue.

The advent of computers and future cloud

Computers changed everything in the leasing world. A computer becomes obsolete in less than a year. The leasing life of a computer therefore fell from a high of 25 years to less than a year. Not that leasing went out of business, but its power certainly waned. Now that we are in the internet era, things have actually changed to an extent that old ways of doing business have gone out of fashion. If you wanted to have an online presence, you not only required servers but also the communication backbone to connect to the outside world. You had to perforce place your servers in someone else’s datacenter. At this juncture we came across multiple options. We could lease server with the backbone, we could buy our own servers and locate them in a datacenter. Hosting services for shared servers mushroomed. You would be amazed to know that there are no standards for web hosting services. They come in all shapes, sizes and colors. From a technical point of view it looked like a thorough mess – but it worked and still works.

Now let’s look at the scenario from a different perspective, Load Balancer . If your typical business has one leased server with 500 GB Hard Disk with a quad I5 Intel processor, only 20-25% of the resources would be utilized by you. What happens to the idle machines? If I were a traditional Factory manager, I would be aghast at the underutilization of resources. I will cry wolf, I would shout from the rooftop and not stop till I use all the available machine time. But in our electronic world, no one even blinks at such a colossal underutilization.
In my next post, I will deal with how cloud is an efficient option which we must embrace for the sake of efficiency, if not for anything else.

Be Part of Our Cloud Conversation

Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

About the Guest Author:

Sankarambadi Srinivasan, ‘Srini’, is a maverick writer, technopreneur, geek and online marketing enthusiast rolled into one. He began his career as a Naval weapon specialist. Later, he sold his maiden venture and became head of an offshore Database administration company in Mumbai. He moved on as Chief Technology Officer of one of the largest online entities, where he led consolidation of 300 online servers and introduced several Web 2.0 initiatives. He holds a Master’s degree in Electronics and Telecommunication.

What lies behind the Cloud?

It started as an academic pastime for me. Is there a standard definition of cloud computing? You would be surprised to know that I did not get a clear answer even though I tried all kinds of search with different keywords. The conclusion I have reached is that cloud technology means different things to different people.

More about boasting about great people running great cloud companies

I don’t want to seem like a man on a mission to criticize others, but the feeling I get is that cloud computing is made to look like it’s for big players, huge diversified companies and for those who visualize thousands of servers churning out their zillion of bits of data.

What I found on the net was that Salesforce has grown leaps and bound because of the visionary owners who started off from their garage. Doesn’t this look familiar? I thought even Microsoft began their humble career from a garage. But what does that tell me about cloud computing? Nothing, I tried to search with other smart keywords and landed up with the great Jeff Bezos and Amazon. It seems that Amazon leapt into the cloud straight from their bookstore (which is what Amazon started off as). There are praises galore about Jeff competing with software giant like Microsoft and search master like Google and beating them both. Good for Amazon, I will say. But what’s in it for me? I mean, I am a small fry, trying to made do with meagre resources and running a Pop and Mom store online. Why should I go for the Amazons and Googles of this world?

The hype around big clouds is frightening

The conclusion I have reached is that there is too much of hype about Amazon, Azure and Salesforce. I don’t want to belittle anyone, but it’s a question of scale. Amazon Web Services and others of its ilk have made it big because they have mastered the art of big numbers. They are big, very big and that’s their major advantage. But for me such a large scale is meaningless. When I go to AWS, I get a feeling that I am about to scale the Great Wall of China. But what I want is a humble cloud where I can put my meagre belongings and web pages and do it at a reasonable cost. I don’t want overheads and technical staff eating into my profits. With cloud providers like Amazon, I get a feeling that I need some expert technical guy who would cost a bomb to look after my website on the cloud. The whole thing is frustrating. I am told that I will save money if I move into a cloud but it looks otherwise. Is there a cloud provider who would show me the savings and still reduce my overheads?

Is small beautiful?

It may come as a surprise but the internet is swamped by big cloud players and their triumphs. It’s tough to get hold of a small cloud vendor. I should blame Google search for this because it seems to favour large cloud providers. I always knew that Google search is biased but this is simply absurd.

Conclusion

In my next post I will dwell on the search for small but efficient cloud vendors like GMO Cloud that offers one of the highest-performing, standards-based, flexible, and robust cloud solutions in the market. By then I would have done my bit of research on this phenomenon.

Be Part of Our Cloud Conversation

Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

About the Guest Author:

Sankarambadi Srinivasan, ‘Srini’, is a maverick writer, technopreneur, geek and online marketing enthusiast rolled into one. He began his career as a Naval weapon specialist. Later, he sold his maiden venture and became head of an offshore Database administration company in Mumbai. He moved on as Chief Technology Officer of one of the largest online entities, where he led consolidation of 300 online servers and introduced several Web 2.0 initiatives. He holds a Master’s degree in Electronics and Telecommunication.