Sorting Out the Many Faces of Cloud Computing

There are two extreme camps in the debate over cloud computing. One says everything is moving to the cloud, IT staff will be cut, and organizations will save millions of dollars. The other says nothing will move to the cloud because of various concerns such as security, performance, and customization ability. Most businesses are probably using some form of cloud-based services, depending on how loosely "cloud" is defined.

Let's first identify what exactly is meant by "the cloud." There are two major aspects to cloud services: hosted applications and infrastructure. They are both a form of outsourcing, but with vastly different implications.

When applications are hosted and run by another organization they are said to be cloud-based services. Banks usually provide portals for managing various accounts. Payroll companies or check printing houses provide a mechanism by which you can access their application via a website. Most businesses use at least a few applications, via the Web, to communicate with partners and service providers.

Today's Software as a Service (SaaS) models represent the true spirit of cloud computing applications. Rather than buying a CRM product, for example, and installing it on your servers, you can use a Web-based program with all of the functionality and without the hassle. Hosted applications save IT staff time, capital budgets, and hassle. It makes sense to let the people who wrote the software host it for you, since they are the experts.

Many cloud-only service providers have cropped up lately to fulfill a market demand for hosted applications. Salesforce.com is one of the most prominent examples, proving that there is space in the market for SaaS companies to re-implement traditional software as a hosted solution.

Infrastructure as a Service is outsourcing the computing itself. One example is Amazon EC2, which provides the infrastructure where you run operating system instances just as you would on physical servers. In this case you don't buy servers; you rent time on the cloud. One major advantage of cloud-based infrastructure is that you can scale up computing resources very quickly, as opposed to purchasing and installing new servers yourself.

This infrastructure component is what most IT people are referring to when they mention clouds. They are struggling with the options: use EC2, implement a compatible private cloud themselves, or skip it altogether.

The cloud infrastructure is essentially a better way to manage virtualization. It is also, some would say, "the right way to run servers."

The "Everything Is Moving" Crowd

The ability to massively deploy new operating system instances has thankfully forced the IT world as a whole to embrace automation and configuration management. Long-time sysadmins often scoff at the marketing buzz around the cloud, because they have accomplished automated deployment and on-going configuration management of running systems a long time ago. The cloud concept is simply another smart layer, one that balances resources and possibly auto-migrates virtual machines when resource usage changes.

This means that everyone agrees we're headed in the right direction. The right way to manage systems is with automated virtual machines, and the cloud concept is brilliant.

The "everything is moving to a public cloud" camp believes everything involved in running your own data centers is a waste of time and money, unless you're in the hosting business, because large-scale providers can do it much more efficiently.

The "It'll Never Work" Argument

Stability is a problem. Amazon's S3 has had many outages and consistently underperforms. Why would you move your important business computing needs to a single provider? Nobody is immune to outages, regardless of how redundant they are.

Security is another major concern. If a critical piece of a cloud infrastructure becomes compromised, all businesses using it will have a major data breach. It makes more sense to hide critical servers behind a corporate firewall that can be audited, rather than rely on the security of each individual cloud instance

Final Thoughts

That's the argument in a nutshell. Personally, I don't buy the security argument, but stability, reliability, and performance are highly suspect.

Another major point of debate is public versus private clouds. Running your own cloud infrastructure requires that you purchase more computing power than you necessarily need. I think you will find that most businesses are currently in a half-virtualized state. They aren't running cloud-like infrastructure, but a large portion of their servers run as virtual machines. The utilization of those servers is higher (in a good sense) than it has ever been, but there are still a lot of applications running on bare metal.

Businesses will continue to move away from service- or server-based mentalities, toward application-specific uses. Applications can easily be segregated onto individual virtual machine instances, which provides security and manageability benefits (assuming proper automation exists). Those virtual machines can be run the "traditional way," or they can be part of a cloud infrastructure that eases management even further.

For many larger businesses, regardless their position in the cloud debate, it makes the most sense to implement a private cloud infrastructure that is compatible with a cloud provider like EC2. If some instances need to be migrated to a public cloud in the future, and the security department OK's it, you're ready to do so.

This article originally appeared on Internet.com's Enterprise Networking Planet.