Business Driven Cloud Computing: Challenges, Reality and the Changing Shape of Enterprise Authority.

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Preface

I am particularly deeply indebted to my friends who provided so much time and insight during the course of my research. This assignment bears the imprint of many persons. There are more people to thank than can be included in this preface, but the efforts of my many friends are thoroughly interwoven to this text.

I benefited from the excellent mentoring assistance of Emma Chavez Mora whose wisdom and management skills in bringing these projects to their successful conclusion touches every part of this project.

I also owe a great debt of gratitude to my good friends at Technology Management subject who made this project possible. Everyone at Technology Management subject put tremendous effort to finish this subject on a very tight schedule.

My heartfelt thanks goes to Khaled Halteh, my fellow student in Technology Management subject, for his tireless work and dedication, for his outstanding contribution through all this projects. Khaled performed the magic of turning my manuscript drafts into high-quality sentences and was always ready with encouragement and fresh ideas when I was running low on them.

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everyone else had left the building. Dr. Bruce Vanstone, now teaching in the faculty of information technology at Bond University, provided suggestion regarding the project’s coverage.

I also grateful to all faculty members of Maranatha Christian University for their role, offered excellent advices and direction also for the opportunity they gave me.

Finally, I want to express my deep appreciation and my overriding debt to every members of my family for the support and encouragement, who provided me with the time, and inspiration needed to prepare this project. Without their support and patience, writing this project would not have been possible.

Dedicated to the many people I have been privileged to work with who have taught me so much, and as always to my family who are always there to bring joy when I get home, also for their continued love and support.

Bandung, February 2009

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Abstract

The advent of Cloud Computing changes the approach to datacentres networks in terms of throughput and resilience. The ability to scale, control, visualize and customize the cloud network is an important evolution to "data centre in the box" approach. Cloud computing is a compelling way for many businesses, small (private) and large (public) to take advantage of web based applications. One can deploy applications more rapidly across shared server and storage resource pools than is possible with conventional enterprise solutions. Deploying modern web applications across a cloud infrastructure enables a new level of agility that is very difficult to accomplish with traditional silo computing model. New Computing models for virtualization and cloud require a very scalable, resilient and open network infrastructure, different from legacy networking.

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Abstrak

Terciptanya Komputasi Awan mengubah pendekatan para jaringan datacenter dalam hal keluaran dan fleksibilitas. Kemampuan untuk menyesuaikan, mengatur, membayangkan dan mengkustomisasi “jaringan awan” adalah sebuah evolusi penting pada pendekatan “ data center terintegrasi”. Komputasi awan adalah sebuah jalur keharusan pada sebagian besar bisnis-bisnis, baik itu bisnis kecil (pribadi) dan besar (publik) untuk menikmati keuntungan dari aplikasi-aplikasi berbasis web. Yang dapat menjalankan aplikasi-aplikasi dengan lebih cepat melintasi shared server dan sumber daya media penyimpanan daripada yang dapat dilakukan oleh solusi perusahaan konvensional. Menjalankan aplikasi-aplikasi berbasis web modern melintasi sebuah infrastruktur awan memungkinkan sebuah fleksibilitas baru yang hampir tidak mungkin dicapai dengan model komputasi silo tradisional. Model komputasi baru untuk virtualisasi dan “komputasi awan” membutuhkan infrastruktur jaringan terbuka yang berskalabilitas tinggi dan fleksibel berbeda dari jaringan terdahulu.

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Table of pictures

Figure I.1.Market-Oriented Cloud Computing ... 13

Figure II.1. E-science cloud model. ... 25

Figure II.2. High-level market-oriented cloud architecture ... 30

Figure II.3. Relationship between Services ... 32

Figure III.1. Cloud computing architectural fundamentals ... 37

Figure III.2. Workload distribution and management ... 38

Figure III.3. Cloud Computing: The Latest Evolution of Hosting ... 40

Figure III.4. Customer Benefits of Cloud Computing ... 42

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List of Tables

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Chapter I: Cloud Computing in Brief

I.1. Introduction

Nowadays with the advancement of the modern human life, daily needs are commonly provided in that way so everybody can use them. Utility services, such as water, electricity, gas, and telephony are deemed necessary for fulfilling daily life routines. These utility services are accessed so frequently that they need to be available whenever the consumer requires them at any time. Consumers are then able to pay service providers based on their usage of these utility services.

Therefore something similar is happening today in the world of computing. Data and programs are being swept up from desktop PCs and corporate server rooms and installed in the compute cloud. Many companies have a high dependence for the use of computer technology in order to boost their performance. Companies that adapt the newest technology may have better chance to win the competition between other companies.

As software move from PCs to Internet servers, users and developers alike go along for Cloud computing. Some substantial fraction of computing activity is migrating away from the desktop and the corporate server room. This change will affect all levels of the computational things, from casual user to software developer, IT manager, even hardware manufacturer.

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advances of Cloud computing, identifies the concepts and characters of scientific Clouds, and finally presents an example of scientific Cloud for data centres.

I.1.1.

History of Cloud Computing

Technically, cloud computing has been around for a while. The Web itself is a form of cloud computing. Users access web pages that are in the cloud. Over time, speed and reliability on the Internet improved. Improvements in computer processing and connection speed have made the Web an increasingly interactive experience. An increased number of users were able to contribute to the Web's content. When Hotmail began to make web-based email popular in the 1990's it foreshadowed such services.

I.2. Definition of Cloud Computing

First of all, we need to know the definition for the Cloud first:

"A Cloud is a type of parallel and distributed system consisting of a collection of interconnected and virtualised computers that are dynamically provisioned and presented as one or more unified computing resources based on service-level agreements established through negotiation between the service provider and consumers.” 1

Based on the definition above, we can know that Cloud Computing is where computing resources are accessed from an internet rather than a local desktop or data centre.2 Cloud computing is a rapidly growing trend and is highly interlinked with the development of Web 2.0. This said, it needs to be

1_{Rajkumar Buyya, Chee Sin Yeo, and Srikumar Venugopal, “Market-Oriented Cloud}

Computing: Vision, Hype, and Reality for Delivering IT Services as Computing Utilities”,

IEEE DEstrEbuted Systems OnlEne

2_{Christopher Barnatt, “Cloud Computing”,}_{ExplaEnEng Computers WebsEte,}

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appreciated from the outset that conceptually at least cloud computing and Web 2.0 are quite distinct. For specific, the key concept of Web 2.0 is making new forms of online connection between people, services and applications; at the same time as the key concept of cloud computing is the detachment of computing resources from any even notional location.

Whether it’s called cloud computing or on-demand computing, software as a service, or the internet as platform, the common element is a shift in the geography of computation. For example when you create a spreadsheet with the Google Docs service, major components of the software reside on unseen computers possibly spread across continents.

Software for major business applications (such as customer support, sales, and marketing) has generally been run on corporate servers, but several companies now provide it as an on-demand service3. The first was Salesforce.com, founded in 1999, offering a suite of online programs for customer relationship management and other business oriented tasks; the company’s slogan is “No software!”

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(Cloud Computing)

Figure I.1. Global cloud exchange and market infrastructure for trading services4

(Market-Oriented Cloud Computing)

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I.3. Current State

The Web search popularity, as measured by the Google search trends during the last 12 months, for terms “cluster computing”, “Grid computing”, and “Cloud computing”, it can be observed that cluster computing was a popular term during 1990s, from early 2000 Grid computing become popular, and recently Cloud computing started gaining popularity. Here’s the current state which related to Cloud computing5:

• IBM Introduces 'Blue Cloud' Computing, CIO Today - Nov 15 2007

• IBM, EU Launch RESERVOIR Research Initiative for Cloud Computing, IT News Online - Feb 7 2008

• Google and Salesforce.com in Cloud computing deal, Siliconrepublic.com - Apr 14 2008

• Demystifying Cloud Computing, Intelligent Enterprise - Jun 11 2008

• Yahoo realigns to support Cloud computing, 'core strategies', San Antonio Business Journal - Jun 27 2008

• Merrill Lynch Estimates "Cloud Computing" To Be $100 Billion Market, SYS-CON Media - Jul 8 2008

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Table I.1. Comparison of some representative Cloud Platforms6

I.3.1. Problems Background

One of the principle tenants I want you to take away from this subject is to be aware of, and hopefully prepared for, future technology and how best to manage it. Early in the semester, we looked at corporate structures from the STO structure to Drucker’s orchestra model for knowledge based organisations through to the recent structure evolving from the “Google” model.

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One technology topic I mentioned on many occasions is “cloud computing”. This is a very important topic for the future but I didn’t expand on it in any great detail. This will be your final assignment for the subject.

Preparation

You are to form groups of three. Why three? Because there are many issues about cloud computing that are to be covered in this assignment. In groups of three, individual areas of cloud computing can be distributed to group members for research and then put together for the final submission. As I’ve mentioned to you in the past, it is important to choose your group members to cover the tasks to be done which include:

• project (assignment) planning; who is to do what

• setting milestones with an associated schedule

• coordination and supervision of the assignment

• draft review

• compilation of the final report which should include an executive summary, a table of contents and references

To prepare yourselves for the assignment, form your groups of 3 and have your initial meeting. Send me the members of the group (to

jrb17a@gmail.com).

The 3 of you work within the IT department of a large multi-national company. One of you is the CTO of the company and the other 2 are his/her most knowledgeable employees.

Your CEO knows a quite bit about technology and has heard about “cloud computing”. He wants to know what it is and the implications it will have on the business so he asks the 3 of you to provide him with a report of at least 15 pages (at least 5 pages from each member of the group) on cloud computing. He insists that you cite appropriate references to support your work.

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Since you have a lot of other work to do, he has given you 2 weeks to do the report. Jeff Barker is a director of the company and has made himself available to answer any questions as the CEO has taken 2 weeks’ vacation in Mongolia and cannot be contacted.

I.3.2. Problems Identification

Cloud Computing is all good from a company standpoint; they have no desire to buy and maintain lots of computers and software. If a company can let someone else worry about the basic technology, they can focus on the publishing. Any businessperson can see the logic of that.

The flip side, though, is that the company dependent on someone else for their technology, and that can limit the flexibility and even their creativity. In fact, the personal computer itself arose because the old model of business computing, in which companies had big mainframes (aka clouds) and everyone connected to them via "dumb" terminals, was enormously frustrating for the people sitting at those dumb terminals.

I.4. Web 2.0

types of media and services to be published and inter-linked (or "mashed") in

7_{Christopher Barnatt, “Web 2.0”,}_{ExplaEnEng Computers WebsEte,}

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places that lots of people actually know about. Key players in the emerging Web 2.0 marketplace therefore include Google, YouTube, MySpace and Wikipedia.

One distinction between grids and clouds is that the cloud came out of the Web 2.0 mindset. Grid came out of supercomputing teams that have a very strong habit of looking at things that are very complex by nature — and they don’t fear complexity — whereas clouds come out of a mindset where there has to be simplicity. It has to be something highly participatory; you take it home, and you do it, and you put your application in the cloud. If it takes more than 10 minutes, it’s just not right.

At a cursory glance, Clouds appear to be a combination of clusters and Grids. However, this is not the case. Clouds are clearly next-generation data centres with nodes “virtualized” through hypervisor technologies such as VMs, dynamically “provisioned” on demand as a personalized resource collection to meet a specific service-level agreement, which is established through a “negotiation” and accessible as a composable service via “Web 2.0” technologies.

When people think of Web 2.0, usually they think of two distinct attributes. First of all, there are the data-centric mechanisms. We think about mashups and related technologies. But what more important is the community aspect, the ability to build portals and share information and have that sense of community where the knowledge of the community is able to permeate everyone who’s a member of that community. People see both of those as very powerful elements inside the enterprise. What’s really interesting, though, will be this challenge for IT: as IT organizations try to become more standard and create components that are reused, people want to use Web 2.0 technologies to create new applications on the fly8.

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I.4.1. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

Amazon is one of the companies that use Cloud Computing. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon EC2 has simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity. It provides you with complete control of your computing resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.

I.5. Goals

In everything related to technology, there are always pros and cons. These are our findings in the Cloud Computing9:

• Security Not a month goes by without us hearing about a security breach or leaked personal information. Which begs the question: In the cloud, where exactly is all this data being stored? Who has access to it? And how easy is it for someone who doesn’t to get it? The answers to these questions just aren’t as clear cut as they need to be for many SaaS businesses, especially those handling loads of personal data.

9_{Marty Abott, Michael Fisher, “The cloud isn:t for anyone”, New York Times Web Site,}

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• Non-portability While some cloud computing platforms can work with industry standard software like VMware, they still differ from vendor to vendor. An example to illustrate why this is significant: Let’s say you want to store an application or website on Amazon’s EC2 cloud platform. In this case Amazon is the vendor, and you build what is called an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). Then you debug it and ensure everything works. But now that you’re done, you can only use this AMI within EC2 clouds. If you want to access or use the data you’ve stored from another platform, you have to go about recreating your AMI all over again inefficiently.

• Control When you entrust an application to the cloud, you’re basically turning control over to a third party. This third party determines whether your application runs or not, whether your site loads or not and how to respond if your application or site fails to work properly. This raises the issue of service level agreements (SLAs), documents that outline the service a cloud platform provider agrees to give its users.

• Limitations Even though cloud vendors are actively whittling away at the limitations of their platforms, businesses should always ask about limitations before committing, as they can lead to serious problems if not considered. Here are some things to take a close look at:

- Persistent storage on virtual servers

- Public and static IP addresses for virtual servers

- Certification of databases in a virtual environment

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• Performance In the cloud, many virtual servers are maintained by a smaller number of physical servers. This virtualization process requires a lot of memory and system resources and in turn can cause applications running in cloud environments to run slower than they would on actual hardware.

Whether there are still many cons about Cloud Computing, the good things that we want to say about cloud computing10:

1. Cost We’re definitely fans of the cloud computing cost structure. Paying only for actual usage makes perfect sense for growth-oriented companies, especially start-ups. Jeff Barr, web services evangelist at Amazon, notes that he can’t name a single failed start-up that used the company’s EC2 and S3 platforms for its core infrastructure. That’s certainly something to consider when you’re deciding how to host your next billion dollar idea.

2. Speed Another thing to love about cloud computing is how fast and easy it is to pull in resources from other servers to improve the performance of an application or website. This is great for companies looking to scale. Let’s say your site is slammed with traffic after a major announcement. With the cloud, you can simply deploy a few more servers to handle the load until the storm passes — and then draw back down later to keep costs under control.

3. Flexibility ability to implement new servers at a low cost and without server procurement.

10_{Marty Abott, Michael Fisher, “The cloud isn:t for anyone”, New York Times Web Site,}

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I.6. Contexts Boundary

History and current state

• What is cloud computing?

• What is the current state of cloud computing?

• How is it related to Web 2.0?

• Who were the original companies who bought into cloud computing?

• What are the perceived pros and cons of cloud computing (if any)?

Changing technology

What will be its effect on the traditional computing components of:

• hardware

• operating systems

• application software

• databases

• middleware

• infrastructure

• communication facilities

Management Issues

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Will alignment of business processes be easier or more difficult with cloud computing?

Issues within an organisation in relation to cloud computing:

• reliability

• maintenance

• security

• risk management

• managing service provider relationships

• managing legacy systems

• managing assets

• organisational issues

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Chapter VI: Conclusion

Emerging services such as cloud computing services introduce new and complex economic and technical challenges. These are fundamentally changing the way that businesses can operate and the way distributed computing systems are designed. Service engineering requires modelling

Software as a Service (SaaS) as well as modelling services as software.

Traditional methods of model driven software engineering have limitations in this context, and new methods and tools in support of the entire service lifecycle are needed.

In addition, the internet has evolved into a people collaboration platform with continuous online access, and is changing the way people interact with each other. Wikis and digital communities are examples of web 2.0 technologies that have a significant impact on how we exchange and work with all kinds of data and services. Experts believe that these developments will grow further and into the services market. Service evaluations (ratings, recommendation), and community driven support services for business and web services are likely to emerge and contribute to the value of service. 41

Without careful consideration of all relevant economic, technical, and social collaboration challenges, services such as cloud computing services and their adoption in markets cannot succeed. Modelling such services thus places new requirements on the engineering methodology and requires focusing on the challenges that really matter.

For a service to be ready for enterprise to consume, it must pass from the early adopter phase (few enterprises using it with most deployments being experimentation and non business critical projects) to early majority. Evidence of being at this stage comes from a sufficient volume of direct

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enterprise customer references using the service for business-critical purposes to indicate that the service has matured to the point of consideration for IT approval. However, the platforms are maturing and will start to better meet enterprise needs during the next two to three years. 42

The main consumers of cloud computing are small companies and start-ups that don’t have a legacy of IT investments to manage. The concept of cloud computing is new and hard for traditional IT professionals to grasp and trust. The majority of enterprise use of clouds today is by innovative developers in business units and within IT. 43

42_{David A. Wheeler, “High Assurance (for Security or Safety) and Free-Libre / Open Source}

Software (FLOSS)... with Lots on Formal Methods / Software Verification”, David A. Wheeler

Website, http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/high-assurance-floss.html, retrieved

November 30th_{, 2008}

43_{Derek Gottfrid, “Self-service, Prorated Super Computing Fun!”, The New York Times Blog,}

http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/self-service-prorated-super-computing-fun/,

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“Market-Oriented Cloud Computing: Vision, Hype, and Reality for Delivering IT Services as Computing Utilities”, IEEE Distributed

Systems Online, 2008

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