How Not To Get Stuck In The Clouds
June 15, 2009
The promise of cloud computing is that a company can easily scale applications up or down, or move them from internal to external locations, to match demand, optimize performance, or lower costs.
In practice, however, users may find themselves trapped in a relationship with a particular cloud vendor, unable to move applications to internal servers or other clouds without rewriting them from scratch.
"Many of the customers we have spoken to simply assume that the cloud is open," said Brian Goodman, IBM's manager for cloud engineering and experience. "This is a common misconception because of all of the hype circulating around cloud computing."
And, while it might seem that vendors are the one who want to lock the customers in, in many cases it's the customer turning the key, especially as they ask their cloud computing vendor to provide them with customized applications or as they start to integrate cloud applications with some of their own proprietary applications.
"If you're writing very simple things that are very boring-looking--Web screens that just have a lot of drop down boxes, no Flash or Ajax--then those things can be moved from place to place," said David Miller, chief security officer at Covisint, which runs a cloud-based human resources application for General Motors Acceptance Corp. (GMAC). However, Miller notes, "the minute you start making them so that they have really good interaction capability, they become more focused on that deployment platform. And when you pick a platform that has ease of movement, you limit yourself in functionality."
Wall Street firms have been moving operations into the cloud for the past few years. Whether it's Merrill Lynch and research services firm Cowen and Company moving customer relationship management to Salesforce.com or companies like Wachovia setting up internal cloud operations. A cloud allows a company to get computing when they need it, able to scale up or down at will, using external computing providers, internal server grids, or a combination of the two.
Independence from cloud vendors requires a different approach to application management, said Tony Bishop, founder and CEO of cloud consulting firm Adaptivity in Charlotte, N.C., and the discipline to create layers of abstraction.
Abstraction is what enables a cloud to be composed of different types of computers, by isolating applications from the hardware required to run them. But a further layer of abstraction can help isolate the application from the cloud itself, making the application more portable.
In fact, the same techniques used for service oriented architectures are useful in the new cloud environment, he said. This means writing applications in small pieces, each piece only loosely connected to all others--making it possibly to quickly swap out or reuse parts of the application.
Financial services firms that already run internal grids--networked groups of servers able to work as one to handle difficult problems--an easily adapt those applications to run on external clouds as well, said Ivan Casanova, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer at DataSynapse, a grid computing vendor that has now expanded into clouds.
Looking in the middle
A number of cloud management providers, including middleware vendors Tibco Software and GigaSpaces Technologies, offer products and services that can help. Middleware has traditionally been used inside Wall Street firms to enable hardware from different vendors--BM and Sun, for example--o play well together. Today, middleware may play the same function for cloud computing providers.
