The basic architecture of this cloud computing is a massive network of interconnected servers where the web applications reside. The user accessing these applications need not be aware of the physical location of the application’s computer. This not only reduces the cost of installing licensed software at the end user’s computer but also saves the cost associated with deploying, maintaining and upgrading of different business technologies.

I guess by now you have been able to understand what Cloud Computing is all about and would like to know how one can access such services. There are a number of companies who offer such services. Prominent among them are Amazon with their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Google with their Google App Engine. There are also many internet service provider companies who rent space and time on these servers. The amount they charge for this is based on processing time or disk storage. Microsoft has also launched its own recently called AZURE. Azure offers service platforms for web developers, corporate developers, ISVs, system integrators and business. Though it is still not clear about how you need to pay for it but is believed that it will be based on pay by use on processing time, disk storage and bandwidth.

Cloud Computing is a relatively new concept promising the most optimal utilization of computing resources. However we are waiting in baited breadth to see the silver lining on it!

Red Flags

However, the advantages are now accompanied by growing concerns over data privacy, regulation and interoperability issues.

A number of vendors have announced cloud computing offerings in recent weeks, notably Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) , Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) , and this was closely followed by IBM’s (NYSE: IBM) launch of new social networking tools called “Bluehouse.”

The launches have spurred warnings from analyst firms which advise businesses to adopt such offerings with care.

Consultancy Global Secure Systems (GSS) said that organizations should review their IT security arrangements before jumping, even on a trial basis, into the world of cloud computing.

GSS managing director David Hobson pointed to provisions in the Data Protection Act that oblige companies to state clearly where they are storing customer data. The legislation also means that companies cannot store their data outside the European Union.

No Boundaries

The problem with signing up to a cloud computing vendor is that company data could be stored almost anywhere in the world, particularly because vendors need to replicate the data around the world to maintain their own disaster recovery and backup plans, said Hobson.

“Our caution here at GSS doesn’t reflect on the integrity of these new cloud computing services in any way,” he said. “It merely reflects the fact that corporate governance rules and, of course, data protection legislation needs to play catch-up with the real world.”

Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation, voiced more grave concerns about allowing a third party to host private data. He advised organizations to keep private documents in their own hands “for your freedom’s sake”.

Stallman also noted flexibility issues stemming from organizations being locked-in to a particular cloud vendor. “If you do your computing using someone else’s server, the server operator has control over it,” he told vnunet.com.

“It’s just as bad as running a proprietary program, and worse, because even the painful option of patching the binary is impossible.”

Under Construction

Deeper technical problems exist with cloud computing, noted Butler Group analyst Roy Illsley.

“We are still working on the model for cloud computing and in reality we are still at the infrastructure layer,” he said.

Illsley brought up a number of interoperability areas that need to be addressed before organizations should invest too heavily in a cloud storage infrastructure.

He gave the example of VMware’s VMotion product that allows a live migration of running virtual machines from one physical server to another with no downtime.

If this is to work in the cloud, the cloud provider will have to have the same chip generation and the same supplier as the customer.

“Although you can now move between generations of Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) chips, you still cannot interchange between Intel and AMD,” he said.

Meanwhile, Butler Group’s Richard Edwards advised organizations to consider their export strategy when taking to the cloud.

“Think about what strategy you will take if you need to move the operations back in-house,” he said. “Does the software maker make it easy for you and how costly will it be?”

The Flexibility Advantage

If organizations decide that the cloud is for them, Software as a Service provider Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) is keen to make known the benefits.

“Ease of use, flexibility, scalability and a reduction of management and infrastructure overheads are beneficial to businesses of all sizes. With cloud computing businesses can use whatever they need and only need pay for what they use,” said Woodson Martin, vice president of strategy at Salesforce.

Martin said concerns about a loss of control of data are unfounded because many companies lack a control over their data on-premise.

“Many companies don’t even know how many PCs they have connected to their network at any time, let alone what data resides on those PCs and how it is being accessed, used and transported,” he said.

“Companies’ own IT teams are already stretched to breaking point and simply cannot do everything themselves to the same high level as specialist companies.”

Steve Ballmer talked at a deep level about intelligent caching between the cloud and the client. Over an hour of snappy questions by Ann Winblad and Obamaesque nuance from the Microsoft leader let some significant cat out of the bag. No longer software plus services, the net of Ballmer’s signals was cloud + client. If you believe as Jason Calacanis does that we’re on the brink of a startup depression, the technology industry should be very very afraid.

Bill Gates has been thinking so far out ahead for so long that we’ve grown complacent in understanding how long it takes for Microsoft to reposition itself. Most observers still think the company is caught in an intractable wedge between the revenue of the Office group and the release cycles of Windows. The forthcoming Windows 7 announcements at the Professional Developers Conference just before Election Day in Los Angeles can already be understood as a point evolution, more like a service pack from the old Windows NT days when Redmond was trying to absorb consumer Windows into the IT server stream.

Back then, the twinkling in the eye of what became .Net was owned by the Exchange group, who by the accident of the competition with Lotus and Netscape in the Y2K messaging rollup was the owner of Outlook Web Access and a URL addressable hook into the file system. The server code that processed those requests was ASP.Net, and it was first released as a service pack upgrade to Internet Information Server. Within a year, Scott Guthrie had a Visual Studio plug-in that allowed rapid authoring of these applications, laying the groundwork for much of what Guthrie now owns as today’s service pack aka Silverlight and Mesh.

Service packs have always been where Microsoft performs its own jujitsu on itself. What they’re called is irrelevant; what they do is allow innovation and politically incorrect projects to get traction before the normally hyper-aggressive power brokers inside the company regain control and shut down the insurrection. By that time, the market has usually shown the new direction is strategic, and the changes are absorbed in a reorg. But the underlying reasons why these “skunkwork” projects break out are deeply understood by Gates, often years before they emerge in the dynamic of the time.

Steve Ballmer prides himself at underplaying his technical understanding, but he’s gotten away with it for years with Gates as Johnny to his Ed. Now, he has little cover, and at the Churchill Club on Thursday he didn’t bother to hide his command of the details: Virtualization, where he identified the classic Microsoft strategy of moving in and commoditizing the space from 5% to 80% market share. The balanced model of computation, from smart set top boxes to smart apps painted to dumb clients – Ballmer was not talking about plans but the tail end of execution.

Listen closely and he’s talking about applying the right amount of intelligence (software) at the right time. Gone is the software (read client) plus services (read cloud) mantra, discarded now as Windows is in the process of receding behind the user’s perception in favor of the applications that Gates says have always driven the success of the company. The service pack model for Windows 7 is being pushed to the cloud and virtualized, with updates streaming down to the user on demand rather than bundled on the dead DVD.

This is the SlingBox platform of application virtualization, and just because Google has pioneered it doesn’t mean Gates didn’t anticipate it years ago. Spray the bits onto a range of devices from phone to big screen, and neutralize the pain of migrating the hardware base with a Mesh/Silverlight OS that replaces Windows on the client with Windows in the cloud. Ellison is right – go along with the name change but stay ahead in the apps race by making the decision about where the code resides purely a function of caching and predictive push.

It’s like the Obama/McCain debate. Watch it live and McCain won. Watch the moments as sequences, ranked and streamed according to the logic of each section, and Obama won. Listen again to Ballmer and you hear a tough competitor, cagey and jovial, more relaxed than I’ve seen him in years. It’s the calm of the lion, relaxing in the shade and watching the world, his world, lining up.

]]> http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/09/cloud-client/feed/ 0 http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/09/okay-so-what-the-heck-is-web-30/ http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/09/okay-so-what-the-heck-is-web-30/#comments Wed, 03 Sep 2008 10:55:30 +0000 John Brandon 11751 at http://blogs.computerworld.com The lurching, heaving behemoth of the Web will become a self-feeding entity someday, symmetrical and aligned with itself, ubiquitous and pervasive, not constrained by the browser or even a PC. That's the vision for the world wide Web after Web 2.0 - a concept where apps are islands, users interact only through portals that let them interact, programming languages don't understand each other, and we're limited by what the OS, the network, the browser, and the computer will permit.

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The problem is that the cloud doesn’t actually solve every problem today. It may actually only solve a small percentage of problems. If I am doing my accounting on my laptop using Microsoft Excel because that’s what my boss told me to use, then the cloud doesn’t help. If I am a data center manager and my company just installed a new storage array that has to meet the needs of a growing marketing department, then the cloud is not going to help me. It may help eventually, I know.

The move is an attempt to remove barriers in order for its enterprise customers to develop more dynamic data centers and enterprise IT systems using virtualization software, according to the software maker.

The revamped licensing is Microsoft’s response to the growth of virtualization in enterprises, said Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates.

“Microsoft had to do something about its licensing to acknowledge the reality of virtualization,” he told the E-Commerce Times.

It is a number-laden tome whose overall findings aren’t particularly surprising. Spending on information technology worldwide, Gartner projects, will grow at a rate a bit higher than global economic growth — up 10 percent (4.5 percent adjusted for a weak dollar), to $3.4 trillion this year. The weakness in the United States will be offset by the strength in emerging economies, and not just the well-known BRIC bloc (Brazil, Russia, India and China). In the Middle East and Africa, Gartner expects technology spending to rise by 15 percent this year.

But the information technology sector has become so large and so central to the world’s economy that the spending total is not the place to look. The top-line numbers, almost inevitably, mask the ferment beneath.

Too Many Choices

The question became, “Is it possible to produce a set of meaningful search results that will help people, rather than inundate them?”

In response, enterprise search technologies introduced tools that allowed “experts” to tune the search algorithm for their specific content, and introduced meta-tagging best practices to structure content and produce more meaningful results. More recently, explicit user actions such as click-throughs, ratings and feedback were introduced to solve the issue of search relevancy. Today, advanced techniques including “social search” have evolved to take into account how humans search for, find, and consume information and products in the physical world.

The move is in the ownership of data value to the very people who really need it, who help define its analysis, and who can best use it for business and consumption advantage. Analysis and productivity values rule the future of data as services.

But how to jibe the best of the old with the needs of the new? How to use data services as onramps to SOA? How to bring data together for federated analysis? And how to use the power of open source licenses and community to encourage the further federation of data as standardized consumable services?

The other nugget of information found in the video is that the game is running on OTOY, the 3D engine that renders graphics in the cloud. The technology allows relatively weak computers (or even mobile phones) to display incredibly detailed graphics comparable to those seen in Hollywood movies.

The video shows a massive virtual city filled with towering skyscrapers, parks, user-customized apartments and houses, public meeting places, subways, and everything else you might expect in a metropolitan area, all beautifully rendered by the OTOY engine. The game also features impressive real time lighting, reflection, and weather effects that rival those seen in detailed 3D games (and even some movies).

At this point it appears that gameplay will be focused on human avatars, who can own their own living spaces and offices, buy and sell goods at a virtual mall, and interact with each other in public places.

While there are a number of online games that offer impressive graphics (though none of this caliber), the real potential behind LivePlace and the OTOY engine is the cloud-based rendering engine, which allows games on almost any computer to play without needing a powerful graphics card. OTOY has been developed to work in any browser without a plugin, which makes the barrier for entry into this virtual world much lower than Second Life. Of course, we have no idea when City Space will actually launch, so it’s far to early to hail it as the second coming of social online worlds.