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Adil Mohammed, co-founder of entrip, with his take on why the cloud is perfect for startups. This was a presentation he gave at CloudCamp in London.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Sam Charrington, one of the organizers of CloudCamp, put up a review of the three conferences. Found a picture of me (at the end of the table talking) in one of the sessions. (Thanks Sam!)
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Coté over at Redmonk just went nuts 
and posted 5 articles on his views and observations of last week’s cloud conferences (CloudCamp, Structure 08, Velocity).
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Loading ...Throughout the CloudCamp sessions, most people discussed cloud computing as infrastructure in the cloud. People talk about the advantage of not having to procure and configure physical servers. People talk about the elasticity and utility factors of the cloud. People talk about scalability of the cloud. But not once, at least in my conversations, did people talk about the applications in the cloud. The one time that I raised the question that related SaaS to cloud computing, I was immediately told that SaaS is not cloud computing. Some even questioned wether Google App Engine is considered to be a cloud.
During Reuven Cohen’s “What is Cloud Computing?” session at CloudCamp, the first question I asked the group after Reuven did the introduction was, “What is Computing?”
Wikipedia defines it as the activity of developing and using computer technology, including computer hardware and software.
Computing Curricula 2005[1] defined computing: (via Wikipedia)
In a general way, we can define computing to mean any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computers. Thus, computing includes designing and building hardware and software systems for a wide range of purposes; processing, structuring, and managing various kinds of information; doing scientific studies using computers; making computer systems behave intelligently; creating and using communications and entertainment media; finding and gathering information relevant to any particular purpose, and so on. The list is virtually endless, and the possibilities are vast.
Based on these definitions, it would seem like running and using any type of application, including SaaS applications, would be considered “computing.”
So then what is cloud computing?
Gartner defines cloud computing as, “a style of computing in which massively scalable IT-enabled
capabilities are delivered ‘as a service’ to multiple customers using Internet technologies.”
I am generally fine with this definition. It is sufficiently vague that it can cover many different things. It’s also not that different from how Reuven Cohen defined it, “Internet centric software.” So let’s for the time being accept this as the definition.
However, I will try to go a bit further here. In the computer industry, there’s always been the notions of platforms and applications. Wikipedia says that
In computing, a platform describes some sort of hardware architecture or software framework (including application frameworks), that allows software to run. Typical platforms include a computer’s architecture, operating system, programming languages and related runtime libraries or graphical user interface.
and
Application software is a subclass of computer software that employs the capabilities of a computer directly and thoroughly to a task that the user wishes to perform. … Typical examples of software applications are word processors, spreadsheets, and media players.
This is no different in the cloud computing world. In the cloud computing world, there are “Cloud Platforms” and “Cloud Applications.” Cloud platforms include offerings such as Amazon’s EC2 and S3, or Joyent’s Accelerator. Cloud applications include offerings such as Salesforce.com, NetSuite, SuccessFactor and many others.
So, is SaaS cloud computing?
Absolutely!
Since using applications is considered to be computing, and that SaaS is basically providing application software in the cloud, then using SaaS should be considered cloud computing.
Jason Stamper also says “yes” and sees no difference whatsoever.
Interesting enough, Gartner says “no” and calls it a myth that people consider SaaS to be cloud computing. Why they say no is a mystery to me. If you look at Gartner’s definition on cloud computing, there’s absolutely nothing there that would exclude SaaS.
What do you think? Is SaaS Cloud Computing?
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Reuven Cohen, Dave Nielsen, Sam Charrington and a group of awesome volunteers organized a very successful CloudCamp event last night. This was organized in 3.5 weeks, which is an amazing feat. The event probably attracted 200-300 people. You can see some of the pictures of the event on flickr. The format was an unconference. There were 20+ sessions proposed and they were all very interesting. The topics range from cloud computing definition to transactions processing.
Here are some of the topics that I gathered based on the sessions I attended and people I’ve talked to.
There’s no agreement on the definition of Cloud Computing. Reuven Cohen held a very popular session on “What is Cloud Computing?” There were at least 40 people in the room that was supposed to hold only 20. There were a wide variant of definitions, going from Reuven’s very open definition (internet centric software) to another person’s very restrictive definition (cloud computing must use web services, XML, SOAP, etc).
There were also discussions (and disagreements) on whether Google App engine is considered a cloud or not. Interesting enough, some of the people there didn’t consider GAE as a cloud. In one of the sessions, someone put an even more restrictive constraint on cloud computing. He said that a cloud MUST run any existing application without modification. So in that case, GAE would not be a cloud by his definition. I am definitely in the camp of that GAE is a cloud.
Some interesting questions were asked as well, such as the question from a Microsoft guy, “Does the operating system still matter, if the the application is running in the cloud. My answer to that was it depends on the type of application. If it’s a web centric application that has a web front end, uses a database for storage, and doesn’t use any of the low level file IO, then really there’s no need to know what the OS is. In that case, the OS doesn’t matter.
The term that’s used most to describe cloud computing is elasticity: the ability to quickly provision and de-provision computing resources on demand. Almost everyone I’ve talked to or listened to agrees to that. Some of the enterprise attendees also noted this as one of the biggest benefits of the cloud. When business units come to IT with new application requirements, IT now has a way to quickly spin up resources without having to wait weeks or months to procure equipment. The other thing that everyone agrees on is the utility model: the ability to pay for what you use.
This topic was heavily discussed in the “No Cure for Cancer: Manage the Expectations of Cloud Computing” session. To summarize, there’s almost no SLAs provided by the cloud providers today. Even Jeff Barr from Amazon said that AWS only provides SLA for their S3 service. I haven’t researched the SLA issue so not sure how true that is. But if it’s true, I think this will be one of the biggest factor, if not the biggest factor, in enterprise adoption. Can you imagine enterprises signing up cloud computing contracts without SLAs clearly defined? It’s like going to host their business critical infrastructure in a data center that doesn’t have clearly defined SLA.
We all know that SLAs really doesn’t buy you much. In most cases, enterprises get refunded for the amount of time that the network was down. No SLA will cover business loss. However, as one of the CSOs I met said, it’s about risk transfer. As long as there’s a defined SLA on paper, when the network/site goes down, they can go after somebody. If there’s no SLA, it will be the CIO/CSO’s head that’s on the chopping block.
Another topic that was discussed in Sam Charrington’s “How Cloud Impacts Enterprise Computing” session is security in the cloud. When Sam asked the group what are the factors that prevent enterprise from adopting the cloud, Ben Charian from ServiceCloud empathically said “security.” He talked about that the clouds must be certified or audited against standards or frameworks such as PCI. I’ve written about cloud security requirements here and here so I won’t elaborate on this topic. Needless to say, I am in total agreement with Ben. What I didn’t agree with Ben on is the need to rewrite these frameworks or standards specifically for the cloud. I believe many of the controls such as identity management and segregation of duties are the same in the cloud or out of the cloud.
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