Forecast: Clouds, Fog - Followed by Partial Clearing

Cloud computing has become one of the more interesting trends in the technical world in the last year or so. But it is not easy to see through the fog surrounding this latest buzzword. It’s worthwhile for a project manager to understand this trend and to think about where it might take us.

The term cloud computing came from the world of networking, where a diagram of a wide-area network would often show a large cloud in the middle that was meant to represent some mixture of the Internet and private links. The idea was that the communications from various servers and workstations went into the cloud and the cloud took care of routing the communications to the correct point. The cloud was generally conceived to be managed by the ISP or telecom company.

Recently, virtualization has allowed any server to be easily split into many small servers that could be resized and brought up and down, independent of the underlying hardware. A hosting provider could allow a customer to manage their server resources in a more flexible manner. A virtual server could be made available somewhere on the Internet and so could be thought of as a “cloud computer”.

Curiously, the organizations that have begun to make a serious impact on cloud computing have not been ISPs, telecoms or hosting providers. Instead, it has been a small group of large companies that already had very large infrastructures set up to manage their own businesses. We are talking here about Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Of the three, the Amazon offering is the most mature and I’ll focus on it as an example of how this all works.

Amazon’s offering is called simply Amazon Web Services – AWS. Its most basic components are Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3). The EC2 service allows a user to set up virtual servers quickly and easily, paying only for the resources actually used. The S3 service allows users to store data – any kind of data – and access it from an EC2 server or anywhere within their own infrastructure.

This way of working can be very cost-effective for testing. A tech can bring up a virtual server, load software and data and be ready to test in a short period of time. When he is done testing, he can save the data to S3 (or on a server back in his own office) and drop the virtual server. He can do several days testing for just a few dollars. If he had to get a real server it could take weeks and cost hundreds of dollars or more.

Beyond testing, this kind of set-up can be a great help for a company who has a lot of peaks and valleys in their computing needs, such as retailers who get most of their sales in November-December. They can have a small virtual server most of the year and easily double or triple their capacity during the holiday sales season.

It probably makes less sense for a company with a steady, even usage pattern and little (or very predictable) growth to use this kind of service for production. This kind of company can plan, purchase, install and maintain servers and storage far enough in advance to meet demand and probably do it less expensively. But in today’s environment, there are fewer and fewer organizations who are in this predictable category.

From everything I have seen, Amazon is far in advance of anyone else in terms of their services, management, reliability and availability.

I started using Amazon S3 nearly a year ago almost by accident. I wanted an easy, cheap and secure way to store important files online for backup purposes.. There are several commercial offerings that charge upwards of $15 per month. With S3 and an inexpensive software component (Jungledisk - $10), I was up and running very quickly. The cost? About $1 per month!

As a project manager, if you have any flexibility in how your infrastructure is deployed, it would be worth your while to investigate cloud computing as an alternative. It could be a way for you to shave costs and time. It is not appropriate for every task (security policies may make it impossible). But if you have ever had to wait weeks for procurement to get you that test server, it can be a huge victory to get it done in a couple of hours for one-tenth the cost.

Keep an eye on this technology. The fog will clear and I predict sunny weather ahead.

Links:
http://aws.amazon.com
http://www.jungledisk.com