When Does It Make Sense to Use the Cloud?

Simon PonsfordSenior Scientist – Cloud Computing

QCRI

Technical, economic and environmental considerations

Cloud Computing - Definition

What Is Cloud Computing?

Infinitely scalable shared computing resources available on demand via the Internet where the user is charged only for what they use.

—Simon Ponsford, QCRI

Public Cloud

Private Cloud

Made available to the general public.

Datacenter of a business or organization e.g. the UK government intends to migrate the 500 existing government server rooms datacenters into 12 datacenters.

If a business simply virtualizes servers this is not a private Cloud

Cloud Computing Advantages

The main players: • Amazon Web Services• Microsoft Azure• Google• A host of smaller localized organizations developing and operating

Cloud-based services.

Who Is Involved Today?

The Advantages

Highly available

On demand – enterprise quality computing resources

No requirement to employ datacenter staff

No capital outlay

Rapid access to resources

Allows entrepreneurs to build and test new ideas without the need to invest in infrastructure or require set-up expertise

The Reality

Not cheap – probably triple the cost of buying a server, installing and maintaining it.

Not fast – particularly disk access. E.g. Amazon EC2 usage of EBS storage 18 MB per second, a new HP server, e.g. DL360 with SAS disks, 400 MB per second read and write

Difficult to estimate pricing e.g. pay per RAM hour, GB storage, CPU Core, disk I/O, database transaction, bandwidth usage and operating system. How do you know how many transactions you are going to do in a month? It is so complex there is a market for applications to calculate costs, and businesses reselling Cloud Services with more traditional cost structures.

No open standards for Clouds

Migration between different Cloud providers is difficult

So where is it a good fit?

Case Study – Bumper Sticker

LinkedIn’s Cloud Computing Experiment

• LinkedIn wanted to test rapid application development and Cloud scaling.

• Built an application called “Bumper Sticker” in 2008. Allowed a bumper sticker to be added to a Facebook profile.

• Used Joynet – Cloud Service provider.• Reached 1 million users in first 46 days.• 13.5 million installations.• At height, 1 billion page views per month.

Cloud Computing – Accommodates the Unknown

If you don’t know, go Cloud

• Business unknowns• How successful will I be?• No longer need to overprovision when purchasing IT systems• If your requirements level out, you may want to switch to a hosted or

onsite solution to save costs.

Greener?

In April 2010, Vivek Kundra, US Federal Chief Information Officer, said in reference to the 1,200 datacentres run by the government:

“One of the most troubling aspects about the data centres is that in a lot of these cases, we’re finding that server utilization is actually around 7%.” Industry average is 15-20%.

Google achieves more than 50%; Amazon is similar. These result in significant energy saving.

Improve Utilization

THANK YOU