Interop NY 2008: What is Cloud Computing?

In early September, Nelly Yusupova offered a couple of full conference passes to the Interop New York conference, held at the Javits Center from September 15-19.  I applied and as luck would have it, I won a free pass!

Interop NY was essentially a conference for IT people—those dealing with the nuts and bolts of application development and delivery, infrastructure development and network support. In short, it was a place for Really Smart People.

I am a freelance web designer and photographer and to tell you the truth, I was a bit intimidated and overwhelmed at how technical the conference was but decided to rise to the challenge.  It was a great opportunity to learn something new. 

So, two weeks before and all during the conference, I dug in and began a frenzy of self-education, some of which I will try to share with you in a couple posts.

There were several educational tracks offered, encompassing subjects from Enterprise 2.0 to VoIP to Networking to Cloud Computing. I chose to follow two: SaaS, or Software as a Service, and Cloud Computing; most of us are, or are going to be, involved in both.

First: the Cloud.

Defining the cloud is simple:
Sam Johnston: “Cloud computing is the realization of Internet (‘cloud’) based development and use of computer technology delivered by an ecosystem of providers.”

Defining the cloud is impossible:
Michael Coté, an industry analyst at Redmonk: “A Darwinian evolution of the exact definition of cloud computing is running around. We’re about a country mile away from ‘knowing it when I see it.’ “

Cloud computing, according to people interviewed at this year’s Web 2.0 conference:  What is the Cloud?

Ahem. Now that you are [un]clear on that…a little more info.

Currently, we are all probably working in some kind of virtual environment, either at home or at the office. We partition our external hard drives into virtual drives. Our companies run our business apps from centralized servers, and our desktop computers are no more than little virtual machines—VM’s—which happily run applications stored somewhere on the premises.

Cloud computing is the next logical step in this visualization of computing and delivery of services. Our balance sheets, our CRM, our ways of finding each other via social networks will all flow in and out of it. Some experts actually prefer the term ‘Cloud services,’ as that more fully describes the business products and services that are delivered and consumed each time we enter the Cloud. Even now, many enterprises access services and storage and business apps from somewhere offsite: companies long accustomed to storing and protecting their data on site now store and access data in remote data centers scattered across the world, thanks to places like Amazon S3 Storage Service.

Peter Laird of Oracle spoke eloquently about the Cloud at Interop NY. I would recommend having a look at his series of posts on the Cloud:

In them, Laird describes a taxonomy of the Cloud, in which he layers several common cloud ‘subsets’ (none of which is ‘cumulus’ or ‘cirrus,’ although those would have been nicer names): SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

We now access powerful web-based collaboration and messaging tools like Google Apps and Lotus Notes, applications that enable employees to meet in the virtual world instead of the board room, applications that enable them to define and interact with customer bases in new ways.  Web-based SaaS tools developed by CRM leaders Salesforce.com and Netsuite have already led us toward the Cloud.

As mentioned in a recent issue of Wired, in a discussion of Amazon Web Services, we are moving toward a model in which multiple infrastructures serve multiple organizations and are managed and maintained at multiple data centers on multiple servers. Information stored in the Cloud will be accessible anywhere in the world, with the Cloud being the single point of entry for all consumers.

Some developers believe that in the not-so-distant future, next generation browsers like Google Chrome will evolve into ‘Cloud Operating Systems.’  The promise of Chrome, which is now in beta for Windows, according to Sam Johnston:

“What is perhaps most interesting though (at least from a cloud computing point of view) is the full-frontal assault on traditional operating system functions like process management (with a task manager that allows users to “see what sites are using the most memory, downloading the most bytes and abusing (their) CPU”). Chrome is effectively a Cloud Operating Environment for any (supported) operating system in the same way that early releases of Windows were GUIs for DOS. All we need to do now is load it on to a (free) operating system like Linux and wire it up to cloud storage (ala Mozilla Weave) for preferences (eg bookmarks, history) and user files (eg uploads, downloads) and we have a full blown Cloud Operating System.”

We are just beginning to wrestle with the good and bad aspects of our global migration to the Cloud: vast economies of scale, scalability and flexibility in application usage and data storage are tempered by the loss of vertical control and security issues. I’ll have a closer look at these issues in my next post, in a discussion of SaaS and PaaS.

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