Cloud Computing and the Hype Cycle

We are about 6 months into the hype cycle, with a lot left to go. What will the industry be feeling over the coming months and years?

Posted By Randall on 02-Jun-2008

There was an article today at ComputerWeekly, called "The end of the IT Department, is it in the cloud?" In it, Tom Austin of Gartner says he expects uptake of cloud services to increase dramatically by 2013. If it is true that the hype-cycle is cresting, there will be 5 years of trough, which is unlikely. We haven't really gotten started with cloud computing and there is a lot of hype left to be generated.

There was a lot more hype around Web 2.0 in my opinion and cloud computing has a lot more substance. Austin agrees saying, cloud computing is "probably the single biggest magnitude wave of change that we've ever seen." The situation now though, is that those on the edge of IT are getting tired of hype in general. It started with the dot com boom, then Web 2.0, Social Networking, and now there are a lot more skeptics out there. Anything getting buzz in the industry is going to get a lot more scrutiny as well -- and faster.

There are a lot of parallels between the hype around Web 2.0, Social Networking, and Cloud Computing, but the significant difference is that cloud computing is more difficult for the consumer to understand, because few of them interact directly with cloud computing services. For them, cloud computing is mostly behind the scenes. They use and interact with Web 2.0 websites and social networks, but they know little of the infrastructure behind the systems. For that single reason, the buzz will not reach such dramatic levels as Web 2.0. Still though, "cloud computing" only really got started at the end of 2007, it is premature to be suggesting we've reached the crest of the wave.

We have yet to really understand what cloud computing is and all the benefits it will offer society. Most conversations about the topic outside conferences are still trying to explain exactly what cloud computing is. Until we understand what it is, how can we comprehend the magnitude of the influence? You could say we don't understand it enough and therefore expect too much, but the opposite is true.

Mosso CloudFS

Today, Mosso announced a cloud storage service to compliment their cloud computing service. Existing Mosso customers can consolidate cloud providers and save money on bandwidth compared to Amazon S3.

Posted By Randall on 05-May-2008

Cloud computing is the hot topic in the computing space today. For nearly two years now, Mosso has been providing compute cloud services on the LAMP stack and Microsoft .NET, but accounts are now limited to 50GB of disk space without incurring overage fees. Each gig over costs $0.50. Compare this to Mosso's new cloud storage offering at $0.15 per GB.

The Cloud Storage service is priced to compete with Amazon's S3, which Qrimp currently uses for database backups. We abstracted the remote storage calls, so I suspect it will be a trivial matter to convert from S3 to Mosso. I signed up for the early beta, I'll blog more about that as I use the service. You can sign up for the free pre-release beta here. John Engates also has a post in the Racklabs Blog talking about the process of building the Cloud Storage system.

The thing that really interests me about the service is now Qrimp can consolidate our service providers. Mosso provides our database and compute cloud services, but backing up to S3 requires managing multiple vendors. Being on the .NET platform, we can't easily use Amazon EC2, so the logical answer is to move file storage to Mosso's Cloud.

I can't wait to use this new service. Subscribe to the Qrimp Blog and I'll keep you updated. I plan to post some code samples for others who are on S3, but would like to migrate to CloudFS.

The difference between Web Hosting and Cloud Computing

What exactly is the difference between hosting and cloud computing? Aren't they the same? No.

Posted By Randall on 24-Apr-2008

Gordon Haff's post on The New Hosting Provider? over at Illuminata made me realize the differences between cloud computing and web hosting aren't exactly clear. Where do all these things fit? Who needs what? He mentions simple services like Blogger being more attractive to the novices, but cloud computing isn't about solving a specific software problem, like building a blog.

What is Cloud Computing?

Remember the old days when mainframes were really expensive, so companies that needed a lot of computing power would time share Crays? Cloud computing is like that. Cloud Computing is hardware, a lot of hardware, in a data center, somewhere, that is shared by many users. Users of the cloud, like time sharers of Crays, are given as much computing power as they need -- when they need it.

This differs from typical Web Hosting, because web hosting gives you a fixed server or a portion of a single server, where cloud computing gives you the benefit of many servers all working together as one. Your particular website or application may only need one small portion of a single server, so there's no need to get a dedicated server. Those servers sit on, consuming power and space even if it isn't needed.

Where cloud computing really offers benefits is when a website or application gets hit with a lot of traffic in a very short amount of time. This is also known as "slash-dotted" or "the digg effect." As you can see from those links, on a regular web host, you'd be toast. This very thing happened to John M. Willis recently, but Mosso, a cloud computing provider, saved his bacon.

This is because Mosso has additional capacity, beyond a single server, to serve his blog. If the hits come in a massive wave, The Cloud automatically distributes the load to multiple servers. When the hits subside, John's blog is taken off those additional servers, freeing up computing space for other blogs and sites like Qrimp.

Scaling a site is not a trivial problem. Difficulties lie at all levels of the stack and working out the kinks becomes exponentially more difficult as you add servers to the farm. You have to build a high performance network for all the servers and then you have to make sure those servers can communicate with each other effectively. On top of that is the software that has to properly use data caching and optimized code. The industry is so diverse that there are experts at every level -- and they are expensive -- the good ones anyway.

The good news is that end users don't have to worry about it anymore. Those end users include developers as well. The less people have to worry about, the more productive they can be and the better they are able to solve particular problems. Mosso solves Qrimp's hardware problem, Qrimp can then focus on and solve the software optimization and interface problems, and our customers can focus on their business problems and how they are going to solve them with databases and web applications.

With typical web hosting, the end user, the builder of the website still has to solve the problems at every layer of the application. Of course scaling a site only becomes a problem if it is popular and at that point, like Kyle says, you can bring in the nerds, but you also have to pay for their dedicated services all by yourself. The advantage of Cloud Computing, is that you pay for the hosting and you get the Scalability Nerds' expertise included.

Google App Engine vs. Qrimp

Google just announced their App Engine product that allows developers to create web apps to run on the Google Infrastructure, but it is not browser based web development.

Posted By Randall on 08-Apr-2008

Webware has a post talking about Google's new App Engine. App engine is a cloud product that enables developers to build systems that will run on Google's infrastructure. Their offering competes with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and Mosso to some degree.

So how does this compare to Qrimp? Qrimp too is a cloud computing environment, but Qrimp differs from App Engine, EC2 and Mosso in that you don't have to know how to program to use it. Qrimp is browser based web development, which is a layer on top of the infrastructure that simplifies the development of web systems. With Qrimp, you just copy/paste your spreadsheet data and the rest is done for you. Building a system that would enable that functionality and also run on one of the clouds would be a job unto itself -- that's what Qrimp is for.

EC2 and App Engine are the infrastructure only, so to build a system to run on them, you still have to know how to program and build databases from scratch. You need to understand data modeling and HTML. If you understand those things, Qrimp is even better, but you don't have to know them to use Qrimp.

It's exciting to see these new technologies coming out. EC2 and App Engine and Mosso are like the old Cray mainframes that allowed organizations to build complex algorithms that needed a lot of processing power to run effectively. These clouds are exposing the hardware to organizations who need them to run the applications built on top of them. Qrimp does the same thing, except Qrimp goes one step further into actually bringing the application development environment itself into the web browser.

With the other three cloud offerings, you must develop your system locally on your own hardware, write the code, debug it, build the database and then push that compiled code up to the cloud hardware, or in some cases edit it there. With Qrimp, there is nothing local, it all happens in the browser -- you could even build a custom web application using your cell phone!