At a recent computing conference in San Francisco, 20-odd CEOs and founders of cloud-related computing companies couldn't agree on what Cloud Computing was! Never mind that Dell would like a trademark on the term, it seems to be used most often as a cure-all for all that ails the computing world. However, as someone who is trying to define cloud computing in a way that truly meets my customer's needs, I'd be curious to know what people expect from the cloud: essentially, letting the people it is supposed to serve define the term. I have my own ideas which show up on this  website, but I'd like to hear yours.

IT managers and pundits speak of the reliability of a system in "nines."  Two nines is the same as 99%, which comes to (100%-99%)*365 or 3.65 days of downtime per year, which is typical for non-redundant hardware if you include the time to reload the operating system and restore backups (if you have them) after a failure.   Three nines is about 8 hours of downtime, four nines is about 52 minutes and the holy grail of 5 nines is 7 minutes. 

From a users' point of view, downtime is downtime, but for a provider/vendor/web site manager, downtime is divided into planned and unplanned.  Cloud computing can offer some benefits for planned downtime, but the place that it can have the largest effect on a business is in reducing unplanned downtime.

Planned downtime is usually the result of having to do some sort of software maintenance or release process, which is usually outside the domain of the cloud vendor, unless that vendor also offers IT operations services.  Other sources of planned downtime are upgrades or scheduled equipment repairs.   Most cloud vendors have some planned downtime, but because their business is based on providing high uptime, scheduled downtimes are kept to a minimum.

Unplanned downtime is where cloud vendors have the most to offer, and also the most to lose.   Recent large outages at Amazon and Google have shown that even the largest cloud vendors can still have glitches that take considerable time to repair and give potential cloud customers a scare (perhaps it is because they didn't take some planned downtime??)  On the other hand, cloud vendors have the experienced staff and proven processes that should produce overall hardware and network reliability that meets or exceeds that of the average corporate data center, and far exceeds anything you can achieve with colocated or self-managed servers.  However, despite claims of reliablity, few cloud vendors have tight SLAs (service level agreements) that promise controlled downtime or offer rebates for excess downtime.  Amazon goes the opposite direction and doesn't offer any uptime guarantees, even cautioning users that their instance (or server) can disappear at any time and that they should plan accordingly.   AppLogic-based clouds, provided by companies such as ENKI, are capable of offering better guarantees of uptime because of its inherent self-healing capabilities that can enable 3-4 nines of uptime.  (The exact number depends on how the AppLogic system is set up and administered, which affects the time needed for the system to heal itself.)  However, any cloud computing system, even even those based on AppLogic or similar technologies, can experience unplanned downtime for a variety of reasons, including the common culprit of human error.  While I believe it is possible to produce a cloud computing service that exceeds 4-9's of uptime, the costs would be so high that few would buy it when they compared the price to the average cloud offering.

When you're purchasing cloud computing, it makes sense to look at the SLA of the vendor as well as the reliability of the underlying technology.  But if your needs for uptime exceed that which the vendors and their  technology can offer, there are time-honored techniques for improving it, most of which involve doubling the amount of computing nodes in your application.  There's an old adage that each additional "9" of uptime you get doubles your cost, and that's because you need backup systems that are in place to take over if the primaries fail.  This involves creating a system architecture for your application that allows for either active/passive failover (meaning that the backup nodes are running but not doing anything) or active/active failover (meaning that the backup nodes are normally providing application computing capability).   These solutions can be implemented in any cloud technology but they always require extra design and configuration effort for your application, and they should be tested rigorously to make sure they will work when the chips are down.  Failover solutions are generally less expensive to implement in the Cloud because of the on-demand or pay-as-you go nature of cloud services, which means that you can easily size the backup server nodes to meet your needs and save on computing resources.

An important component of reliability is a good backup strategy.   With cloud computing systems like AppLogic offering highly reliable storage as part of the package, many customers are tempted to skip backup.  But data loss and the resulting unplanned downtime can result not just from failures in the cloud platform, but also software bugs, human error, or malfeasance such as hacking.  If you don't have a backup, you'll be down a long time - and this applies equally to cloud and non-cloud solutions.  The advantages of cloud solutions is that there is usually an inexpensive and large storage facility coupled with the cloud computing offering which gives you a convenient place to store your backups.  For the truly fanatical, backing up your data from one cloud vendor to another provides that extra measure of security.  It pays to think through your backup strategy because most of today's backup software packages or remote backup services were designed for physical servers and not virtual environments having many virtual servers such as you might find in the cloud.  This can mean very high software costs for doing backup if your backup software charges on a "per server" basis and your application is spread across many instances.  If your cloud vendor has a backup offering, usually they have found a way to make backup affordable even if your application consists of many compute instances.

Another aspect of reliability that often escapes cloud computing customers new to the world of computing services is monitoring.  It's very hard to react to unplanned downtime if you don't know your system is down.  It's also hard to avoid unplanned downtime if you don't know you're about to run out of disk space or memory, or perhaps your application is complaining about data corruption.   A remote monitoring service can scan your servers in the cloud on a regular basis for faults, application problems, or even measure the performance of your application (like how long it takes to buy a widget in your web store) and report to you if anything is out of the ordinary.  I say "service" because if you were to install your own monitoring server into your cloud and the cloud went down, so would your monitoring!   At ENKI, we solve this problem by having our monitoring service hosted in a separate data center and under a different software environment than our primary cloud hosting service.

The last aspect of reliability is security.  However, that would require another entire article to cover, since security in the cloud is a complex and relatively new topic.

To sum up, the Cloud offers some enticing advantages with respect to reliability, perhaps the largest of which is that you can give your data center operations responsibility to someone who theoretically can do a much better job at a lower cost than you can.   However, to get very good reliability, you must still apply traditional approaches of redundancy and observability that have been used in physical data centers for decades  - or, you have to find a cloud computing services provider that can implement them for you.

We have a couple customers providing shared hosting from our cloud computing service.   There are two main advantages that those customers see in coming to us instead of building their platform themselves out of colocated servers or other non-cloud approaches.  The first advantage is that AppLogic provides near instant scalability and automatic self-healing features that allow the hosting companies to see improved reliability over hosting on physical hardware, as well as paying only for the resources they use.  This is important for small but growing shared hosting companies, because their cloud computing costs are kept in proportion to their business.  Because of AppLogic's paradigm of a physical datacenter implemented in the virtual domain, moving their shared hosting system (Cpanel, Plesk, etc.) to the cloud is very easy.

The second advantage is that we are essentially their IT department, managing AppLogic for them and handling all system administration.  This frees them from having to have deep technological expertise in order to host their customers on a reliable platform.  All they have to do is to use the control panel in their shared-hosting software to respond to their customer needs.  But more importantly it allows them to be in the hosting business and make money on it while their focus is actually elsewhere (usually on building successful ecommerce sites for their customers.)

Clearly, these advantages aren't going to be viewed as critical to some existing hosting companies, especially ones with deep technology skills.  But by lowering the barrier to being a shared hosting provider, AppLogic based cloud computing can help companies that are "accidental hosters" doing shared hosting as a side business become successful and serve their customers well.

If you are interested in learning more about shared hosting in the AppLogic Cloud at ENKI, we have a white paper describing how you can capture more income from your customers as they grow within your shared hosting environment.  Please contact us to receive the white paper. 

As a partner in a Cloud Computing company, I often see the IT staff of potential customers reacting as though they have this thought in their heads.   In fact, often I simply approach the C-level executives of potential customers on sales calls because their IT staff won't return my calls - so I know they're thinking we're a threat to them.

However, I'm not sure that Cloud Computing is bad for IT employment, and I'll give my reasons below.

My company, ENKI, offers IT outsourced operations services along with Cloud Computing for a total package that can eliminate the need for my customers to hire some staff, especially people who they'd hire for expertise that was only occasionally used.  But, the work still needs to get done by someone, and we are hiring those people in order to deliver their services to my customers.   To say that outsourcing services reduces IT employment somehow assumes that the outsourcing eliminates the work, which it does not.  It may shift it around, though.   I'm also not offshoring the work since I need a tightly knit team to offer the best services I can.

Saying that Cloud Computing is bad for IT employment also somehow assumes that one can wish Cloud Computing away or if you are a manager at a Cloud customer company, that you can simply decide not to use it.   My experience working at big companies is that when a less expensive way to do something comes along, you *must* take advantage of it, or your competition will do it and you'll have to lay people off anyway as you lose business.   So I don't think not using the latest technology, including Cloud Computing, is a choice business can make.   It's like deciding you won't buy a dishwasher, washing machine, or vacuum cleaner because you'd rather give jobs to household employees.

As an IT employee, Cloud Computing offers some advantages as well that I can recognize after being a technology manager for many years.   Every change creates opportunity as well as potential loss.  As an employee, every time there's a change, you can say "I will only do things the old way" or you can embrace the change.   My advice is to learn all you can about Cloud Computing, and be the one in your company that drives its acceptance.  Then you'll be the indispensable employee rather than the disposable stick-in-the-mud that resists the inevitable.   There is a tremendous benefit possible for IT staff in companies using Cloud Computing to move up to more rewarding jobs than those that have been automated away by the Cloud vendors, but they have to have the imagination to see what changes they need to make to take advantage of those opportunities.  Most employers who appreciate the contribution of their good employees will be supportive of their efforts to make those changes so that they can keep them in the company.  Hiring is a difficult, painful, and distracting job and most managers would prefer to have their good employees move to a new position rather than leave.

What I see among my customers, who are mostly fast-growing companies, is that they're hiring people to complement the Cloud Computing services we offer.  The fact that we offer them computing at a tiny fraction of the price of colocation or self-hosting means that they can hire more people to do the jobs they really need in order to succeed, such as DBAs, programmers, system administrators, etc.   Their stream of capital is used in a way that is more beneficial to them, but it is still spent on employment.  This drives their growth, and in turn more hiring.