Blessay:Cloud Computing Not “Essential Service”, More Like “Public Transport”

Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is gen­er­at­ing a lot of smoke, but it is hard to find flam­mable mater­ial that makes it “hot”. I believe that Cloud Computing is unlikely to become Essential Service, but will be more like Public Transport — cheap, mass mar­ket, lim­ited func­tion and “accept­able” for some.

Note

This art­icle was ori­gin­ally pub­lished in November 2008. I was reread­ing it and real­ised that noth­ing has changed in the last 14 months of “Cloud Computing” and it’s worth say­ing it again.

Introduction

With the level of hys­teria on Cloud Computing reach­ing aston­ish­ing levels, I find the huge claims by major league pun­dits ring hol­low but now that man­age­ment teams are issu­ing requests that are flow­ing down into the Technical Design pro­cess it seems time to reflect on what Cloud Computing will do to the design pro­cess. Cloud Computing is some­thing that we have been doing for years in our data centres, the only dif­fer­ence is that it looks sim­pler.

The mar­ket­ing mes­sage is beguil­ing and quite false. Here is what I am hear­ing: “so you simply move your applic­a­tions in to the cloud. The cloud will deliver com­pute and stor­age resources to deliver whatever, wherever you need it. Moreover, it will cheaper than you are paying.”

What rub­bish.

The Seduction

The really seduct­ive part of this pitch, is that all your “pain” around man­aging an IT infra­struc­ture will go away. You can almost hear the senior man­age­ment wish­ing on stars — “I can choose to send all those cost centres to an out­sourcing com­pany” with a huge smile on their faces. You know they are think­ing “Less head count, less hassle, and bet­ter cash flow”.

It’s a good mes­sage, and it’s going to work for a lot of com­pan­ies who are going to waste spend a lot of time on look­ing at Cloud services.

The Reality is not fully integrated

The only dif­fer­ence between the “Cloud” and the cur­rent envir­on­ment in our data centres is the level of integ­ra­tion between all the com­pon­ents. The seduc­tion stems from the idea that all the stor­age, all the com­pute resources and net­work­ing con­nec­tions are already in place. This is pos­sible because they resources are shared around.

From read­ing about the gen­esis of Amazon, the ser­vice was star­ted after a suc­cess­ful IT pro­ject got the stor­age /​ com­pute /​ net­work resources into a coher­ent oper­a­tional plat­form. Pretty simple really. To sum­mar­ise, the Amazon people all got together and agreed that they need to auto­mate the setup of com­pute /​ stor­age /​ net­work resources to sup­port the massive rol­lout that is needed.

So they worked out ways to allow the net­work /​ server /​ stor­age to auto­mate the cre­ation /​ man­age­ment /​ dele­tion of vir­tual instances. As a bonus, each vir­tual instance is highly avail­able and can move around the cloud as needed. However, this means that your choices for oper­at­ing plat­forms are quite lim­ited and don’t allow for cus­tom­isa­tion aka default builds are mandatory.

The Kicker

There is the down­side of the cloud, you get what your given, and a sub­stan­tial about of the com­put­ing plat­form will be pro­scribed by the pro­vider. As Henry Ford said, “you can have any col­our you like, as long as its black”.

Does this work for your environment ?

Where it will fail and fail early.

This web­site is hos­ted with Media Temple. It uses a shared data­base server and shared web server to host the con­tent — it saves money to share resources, right ?

A recent exper­i­ence was that dur­ing the day, per­form­ance of the web site get very poor, with response times of up 60 seconds. The tech sup­port people claim that it is not their sys­tems. Yet, I have scripts that seem to prove that the data­base server is not per­form­ing well and claim that my soft­ware is the problem.

This has been going on for some days now and there appears to be no res­ol­u­tion. The pro­vider claims that their sys­tems are per­form­ing as expec­ted¹, and that noth­ing is wrong. I know that per­form­ance is poor, and can see it.

It won’t take too much of this to give Cloud Computing a bad name. Something very sim­ilar happened to Application Service Providers back in ¹⁹⁹⁹⁄₂₀₀₀. At this time, Citrix was a pop­u­lar way to out­source Microsoft Office and Exchange serv­ers thus cent­ral­ising the com­puters and expert­ise. Telcos and ser­vice pro­viders were quick to offer these ser­vices, but they didn’t last very long before cus­tom­ers went back to the tra­di­tional model. An abso­lute shed­load of cash was spent before it finally petered out.

The main prob­lem was agree­ing on what is the prob­lem. Can you applic­a­tion live with this ? Can your man­age­ment live with you say­ing “It ain’t me, its the cloud”.

Cloud Services that are suc­ceed­ing — there are some.

This is reas­on­ably straight for­ward — any ser­vice that is a simple com­mod­ity will be read­ily trans­ferred to the cloud. Thus ser­vices such as email, word pro­cessing, simple image pro­cessing are exist­ing examples.

In this view, this is tak­ing exist­ing ser­vices such as Google Mail and attach­ing the term ‘cloud com­put­ing’ to it. But this defin­i­tion any ver­sion of Microsoft Exchange is also ‘Cloud Computing’ ser­vice, and its an internal Cloud.

These ser­vices are and will be suc­cess­ful because they are simple, time insens­it­ive and not mis­sion crit­ical².

The Cloud will be what you are given — not what you want!

When the Cloud pro­viders finally get estab­lished, they will have to pro­vi­sion repeat­able, script­able, auto­mated, stand­ard­ised plat­forms. However you cut it, this is unavoid­able because it is unima­gin­ably dif­fi­cult to sup­port hun­dreds of dif­fer­ing con­fig­ur­a­tions and vari­etal sys­tems. As Henry Ford said in the early days of mass pro­duc­tion “Any cus­tomer can have a car painted any col­our that he wants so long as it is black.”

As long as you want these “pre­defined” ser­vices, then Cloud Computing is going to fit you just right.

Isn’t Public Transport just “Great”

As long a you can accept the idea of the ser­vice being less than you might want, then Cloud Computing might work. So just like Public Transport, it works well so long as the train sta­tion is at the end of your road, its cheaper than the altern­at­ives. It isn’t very com­fort­able, and when you get off the bus, you have to walk a bit to get to your destination.

Therefore most com­pan­ies will build their own Private Clouds because these sys­tems can be tailored to their require­ments. While Public Clouds will be lim­ited in flex­ib­il­ity, fea­tures and capability.

I hap­pily use an email “cloud com­put­ing” ser­vice ³, because I can live with the price and lack of fea­tures. In this paradigm, Cloud Computing is for poor people, the not well off, badly advised and no other choices.

When it comes to deliv­er­ing my online web strategy for a cor­por­ate com­pany.… well, pub­lic trans­port works for some people who have no other choice but it doesn’t work so well for most people. Private trans­port takes you where you want to go and back again.

Footnotes

1. does that mean good, I will never know [back]
2. and before you email me, cor­por­ate is NOT mis­sion crit­ical, its can be out of ser­vice for an hour or more before the world starts to end, that’s NOT crit­ical, just mission-​​sensitive [back]
3. Google Gmail [back]

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