Cloud Computing

History

The concept of cloud computing dates back to the 1960s, when John McCarthy famously said, “computation may someday be organised as a public utility”. In fact, “someday” turned out to be that same decade, when as early as the 1960s, large-scale data centres were being deployed. Such data centres utilised the concept of dumb terminals (sometimes called thin clients). In such a system, low-power computer terminals - most having just enough power to boot into a PXE environment (Preboot Execution Environment) would connect via network to a central mainframe, and fetch their operating system over the network. The mainframe would carry out all of the processing, and the terminals would simply send input to the mainframe and receive output.

Back in the 60s cloud computing was not only an option - it was the only way to enable multi-user utilisation of mainframe computers. As the decades passed, the price of hardware fell, allowing business to provide powerful workstations (sometimes called fat clients) on every desk - for a while, the sky was cloudless.

In the early 2000’s, the dot-com bubble burst. Internet companies had to find a way to cut costs and increase efficiency. Amazon was at the forefront of such developments - as a survivor of the bubble, Amazon realised that only 10% of its computer infrastructure was in constant use - the rest was reserved for occasional spikes in traffic - what a waste!

Amazon modernised and used emerging technologies to increase efficiency. Virtualisation played a key role - being able to consolidate several servers onto one machine. Soon, Amazon had so much spare computing capacity that it could sell to others, and this is why Amazon Web Service (AWS) was launched in 2002, and further expanded in 2006-2007. For the first time, customers could ‘rent’ computing power - both in terms of storage and processing power.

Market Leaders

More services were offered, and nowadays the business has a plethora of cloud computing services to choose from, including:

VMWARE
Provider of virtualized infrastructure used to power most of the others mentioned in this list.

Windows Azure

Microsoft's offering of cloud computing including both storage space and cloud APIs.

CITRIX
Leading provider of desktop virtualisation and Software as a Service (SaaS).

SalesForce.com

In the cloud Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Rackspace
High performance and high availability hosting and computing power resources in the cloud.

Amazon Web Services

The market leader in storage, computing, availability and scalability in cloud computing.

Others Include: Bluelock, Joyent, Terramark and Centurylink are notable contenders.

Services Offered on the Cloud

Cloud services are offered as a variety of implementations. Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) is the provision of virtual machines, servers, network attached storage (NAS), load balancers and more, via an external company. Using these services, business can save a hefty sum on initial infrastructure investment, and many times gain much more than it could ever afford by leveraging the enterprise data centres of large providers. Indeed, services such as popular cloud-hosting service Dropbox leverage cloud services - AWS in the case of Dropbox - to provide fast, efficient and virtually unlimited storage for clients. 

A step up from IAAS is PAAS - Platform as a Service. In such an implementation, the cloud provider offers virtual hardware, an operating system, database, web server and programming language execution environment. Examples include Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure. This provides a purchase-and-go solution for business to get up and running quickly and without large up-front investment.

The final tier is SAAS - Software as a Service. In this model, the business need not worry about the installation and maintenance of the software platform - an account is purchased and operations can start immediately. Indeed, many applications are now moving to the cloud, including the ubiquitous Google Apps, Quickbooks and Salesforce.com.

Of course, these cloud services must be accessed by the client - and there is no shortage here. Desktop computers and laptops running any operating system, tablets and smartphones can access most cloud services.

The cloud is offered as a public service, hosted on public service providers as intended to be delivered to the masses - but this is not the only way to provide the cloud. Indeed, private clouds are gaining increasing prominence, with organisations setting up clouds for their private business with increased security and control.

Compared to Local Computing

Of course, as with anything, cloud computing is not a panacea. Several issues exist which may put into question the idea of hedging one’s computing infrastructure on a cloud provider. Several large-scale security exploits such as the PlayStation Network hack and more recently the account compromise of both LinkedIN and last.fm may scare many off -and this is indeed a legitimate reservation.

Another issue is abuse. Hackers can use the large availability of computing power to launch attacks, such as a banking trojan used in 2009 via AWS to launch attacks on PCs infected by malware.

These and other issues may be enough to keep the old hat systems engineer with their computing resources in-house. However, there is no reason why a business facing these legitimate concerns cannot implement a private cloud, avoiding many of the issues surrounding public clouds.