Jun 18
The worlds-famous retiree Bill Gates annouced some weeks ago, that in the future Microsoft will have many millions of servers in their datacenters, which first of all is a very impressive proposition. Nicolas carr has some thoughts on Bills speech <HERE>.
If you break down the numbers - Microsoft claims to add between 10.000 to 20.000 servers to their infrastructure each month - and read datacenter newsletters like <THIS> and <THAT>, you soon will realize, that this definitely will become true rather sooner than later. Sure, MS has to because we might be right before a huge shift of paradigm in the software industy - moving every type of application and data from your destop straight to some datacenter somewhere (hi Google) . Thus making Microsofts main business modell looking kind of old-fashioned.
If you bring things together and look at “Live Mesh” and “Office Live” you will understand, where the world will be in 3 to 5 years from now.
And, I’ll promise you: Microsoft is paying attention to the enterprise market much better than Google and Apple together.
Roland
May 22
I’m working on a simple formula to describe clouds and cloud computing. After working through numerous blogs and posts, reading vendors press releases and visiting their websites, I feel confident enough to give a first try:
What do you think about this:
Cloud = Computers*x + Virtualization + Automation + Service
where x depends on the cpu power of the utilized machines.
I’m begging for comments.
Roland
May 21
Yesterday I had the chance to get a feeling for one of the hottest topics in IT infrastructure. A panel session at IBM PULSE 2008 was dedicated to the topic of Cloud Computing (even though IBM marketing people don´t seem to like the term and have come up with quite some innovative words – words no one uses, so let us stick with the cloud). The panel was buzzing with intelligence, unfortunately we as the audience could not really match up. So we listened to a pretty much directed discussion on how cloud computing would replace today´s approach to hardware and infrastructure in general. Well I do agree, no one needs dedicated servers when resources can be allocated dynamically and come preconfigured and interconnected. Kristin Hansen stripped the key features of a cloud down to simplicity (users do not care how their resources are set up, they just use them), mobility (obviously use is possible from anywhere and even a large computing cluster could be controlled from a phone like device) and elasticity (you only setup or pay what you really need). Sounds fine to everyone and Google and Amazon have definitely shown to the world that this concept works in a closed shop environment. According to Dave Lindquist IBM is working on a methodology and technology to make most applications “cloudable”. The most interesting remark I heard during the discussion was the “Cloud Computing is the combination of technology (virtualization and automation) and discipline (a stringent way of breaking down the offered services into small blocks in order to recombine them quickly and automatically upon the user´s request as well as defining standards or service catalogues to be offered)”. I guess the discipline part will put forth a great deal of discussions between process consultants and methodology consultants and in the end there will certainly be a couple of good ways to set things up. Just as certainly there will be the need to standardize these processes and methodologies in the end, so clouds are not proprietary but keep mobile even between cloud providers.
Naturally I am more interested in the technology part, that is needed behind cloud computing. Technology - in this case - not referring to the cloud management servers and agents themselves, but the technology surrounding them. The first technology that comes to mind is virtualization as without this core there will be no cloud, at least no cloud that can integrate legacy applications rather than working in a very tightly closed universe like Google does. There are quite some good approaches to virtualization – commercially as well as open source – and the approach taken should really depend on the needs of the applications to be run on a specific part of the cloud. It does probably make sense to even merge the available virtualization technologies within one cloud. It might make sense to use containers build into the operating system or complete hardware virtualization depending on the kind of application to be run and therefore a cloud manager will have to deal with all kinds of virtualization technology.
More on my focus is the service management side of cloud computing and I strongly believe that automated operating is a key component of a good cloud infrastructure. Definitely the cloud infrastructure and management components will take care auf automatic provisioning and resource management, but as soon as legacy applications – that do not really know that they are running on a beautifully scalable environment – are involved manual administration of these applications would mean chasing an ever changing rabbit across a chameleon planet – an image most amusing to bystanders but neither funny to administrators nor to the ones paying them. So in my opinion an automation engine could be fed IT model data and monitoring feeds directly from the cloud manager and could thus deal with the ever changing environment and keep the application automation rules up to date with the cloud components currently in use. This automation engine cannot use a drill down approach, because the infrastructure might not even support drill downs and can change ever so often. The automation engine assuring a good foundation for quality service a professional service management will have to use a more human “circle in” or divide and conquer approach.
Does this sound familiar? By the way, check out the articles on the “Blue Cloud”; technical pioneers at work (other bloggers also think about the blue cloud)…. Also interesting is the cooperation between Google and IBM on producing cloud standards
