[roadracer]

Dear All,

What is cloud computing? Could someone explain it from a layman's perspective and with a real world example(if any)?

Cheers.

[ikoneer]

A new service that enables you to have a thin/nil CPU.

All your required software, license would be made available to you by the service provider. Your data would also be stored and maintained by the service provider.

You may just have a monitor, keyboard and mouse with internet/network connection with some kit for connectivity.

[bblost]

Cloud computing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You took a beautiful picture using a digicam.
Now you want to edit the picture using some software like photoshop.
However the s/w you plan on using is very advanced and needs the kind of computing power you currently don't have.
i.e. Your computer does not have the amount of RAM and CPU speed it needs.

You have a choice, either buy all that hardware and software needed or go to your friend who has such a setup.


Now assume you are a company with pretty such the same situation.

You hire the resources that are need.
So you pay for using the resources that are charged as per usage.

Tomorrow, when the software needed become even more demanding in terms of hardware, you are insulated. There is no hardware you own, that needs upgrading.

The service provider does that and you just pay him the money for using the resources.

[bj96]

For example, in production business use, twitter.com uses Amazon EC (Elastic Compute) cloud.

Twitter / Steve Ross: I'm going to use Amazon EC ...

[roadracer]

Guys, Thanks for the quick response. I got the concept now.

[ajmat]

However, you might use cloud computing to store your valuable data and someone from the Russian Mafia or Chinese authoroties might hack in the service providor to steal it or hold it to ransom

So you need to decide based on cost of your data.

[gd1418]

Isn't that paranoia to some unbelievable levels?

Originally Posted by ajmat

However, you might use cloud computing to store your valuable data and someone from the Russian Mafia or Chinese authoroties might hack in the service providor to steal it or hold it to ransom

So you need to decide based on cost of your data.

[Samurai]

Basically it is old pickle in a new bottle. You take the good old 3-tier or even 2-tier software architecture, put the server at the service provider instead of your own data center. Even that is not new, such providers were called ASPs or Application Service Providers, it goes back to the late 90s.

Now that the data bandwidth capacity has grown really big, they are able to move more and more data and functions to the ASPs. So the marketing wizards realise they need a new name, so they call it cloud computing. This is no break-through technology, just a new name to an old technique.

GD, it is not paranoia. Once it outside your network, it is fairgame to any hacker.

[pramods]

to add more, its resource utilization on demand, you will be billed for the CPU cycles used drive space used and don't have to stock your own, so its "pre paid card" you use the service and pay for that without thinking of hardware scaling.

-Pramod

[sgiitk]

Cloud Computing essentially means that the resources, software, storage, etc. reside on the web (on some servers). You borrow / lease the software when you need it. The clients are low end machines with a good networking link.

[bj96]

In layman world, think of it as your big computer whose hard-disks are kept in neighbor's house (she charges you rental for space, power, security, maintenance etc) and CPU + memory kept in another friend's house (he too charges you rental). You just have the keyboard and the monitor at home and all these pieces are connected by a network cable (internet).

In addition to your needs, your neighbor (and friend) could be leasing out hard-disk space and CPU power to other folks too. This is called sharing of resources. When you are not using the resources, someone else might

Do you get the picture?

-BJ

[roadracer]

Guys, I got the picture now. But could one of you give some famous real world example/scenario where this has been implemented.

Cheers.

[bj96]

Originally Posted by roadracer

could one of you give some famous real world example/scenario where this has been implemented

Pls refer my earlier post e.g. Twitter uses cloud.

Originally Posted by bj96

For example, in production business use, twitter.com uses Amazon EC (Elastic Compute) cloud.

Twitter / Steve Ross: I'm going to use Amazon EC ...

[roadracer]

Thanks bj96 for the information.

[josepeter]

Originally Posted by roadracer

Guys, I got the picture now. But could one of you give some famous real world example/scenario where this has been implemented.

Cheers.

Lemme try with some real world examples:

1. Email scanning : Large corporations spend a lot to keep their email scanning infra running on servers within their network. Email scanning is more critical for external emails since there is no control over the platform from which these mails originate. Cloud computing kicks in here with providers like Google Postini, who will do email scanning on the cloud for you. They act as Mail exchangers for your domain and scan every mail that comes through to your domain.

2. Web content scanning : This involves screening outgoing requests to the Internet from a corporate network ( example: you can allow/dissallow certain sites ) and also scans content from allowed sites for malicious data. These would need content filtering servers inside the corp network that are updated regularly. Cloud computing option makes this simpler by outsourcing this service to a web based provider like Scansafe. This is done by pointing all your outbound Internet requests to the providers gateway.


There are many such uses for cloud computing; from my experience this does reduce workload considerably but most often than not turns out to be a nightmare for support teams. You tend to realise that you are mostly at the provider's mercy!