As we have gained sufficient understanding of what cloud computing is, let’s take a look at who’s offering what in cloud computing platform.
Google App Engine:
Google App Engine is a platform provided by google, for developing and hosting your apps in google’s data centers. It is built closely around Google OS. Its good for those developers who are familiar with Google OS and related framework. It is still in beta stage.
Amazon Web Services.
Offered by Amazon, these are collection of remote computing services. You can even deploy and run Microsoft applications here. It offers all components of a basic cloud computing infrastructure like compute, storage, database management and queue. This available commercially for everyone.
Personally, I have not deployed any solutions on these two platforms, so I will prefer to speak less about it.
Microsoft Windows Azure:
This is my favorite. Microsoft provides ‘Windows Azure’ as a cloud computing platform. Azure, is a platform for executing windows applications on cloud. It also stores data on cloud. Azure is an operating system that runs on machines in Microsoft data centers. The most important element for going with Azure is its integration with .net and Visual Studio. It supports any .net language and provides a tight integration with Visual Studio .net. You will get ready-to-use templates in your Visual Studio that helps you to develop and deploy cloud solutions. It is still in beta stage and will be available officially around Jan 2010. We will start discussion Azure and its components, in more details in next posts.
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Friday, December 4, 2009
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Comparing ‘Cloud Computing’ to Rent-A-Car (Azure - Part 4)
Following comparison might speed up, digesting ‘Cloud Computing’ concept.
Imagine, ‘Tata Motors’ has just launched a nation-wide ‘Car-Rental’ service. Assume that with that service, renting a car has become dirt cheap. And they are passing cost benefits, of their scale of operations, to consumers. Assume, it has become so cheap that people are giving second thought before buying a car.
The repercussions…?? Definitely, you will be more than happy. You are going to save money for every imaginable reason. You don’t have to buy the car. No worry of fixing accidental repairs. No more Parking Tickets. No worry of depreciation. No need to hire the driver. No need to spend money on maintenance of the car. No need to buy insurance. No worry of resale hassle, and its valuation. Pure joy of paying, by “per km”. How does it feel? No doubt. Comfortable. (Rather I’m feeling, that it is such a great idea, I should discuss it with Ratan, Anil or Mukesh) :-)
Fun apart. But if you just think aloud, ‘Cloud Computing’ might be beneficial in similar ways, in days to come. It will keep you away from the hassle of buying hardware and licenses before starting a new project. No more IT hardware / helpdesk-support personnel required. No more patch management. No more worries of hardware upgradation and license renewal with every passing year. No more depreciating assets. No more questions of what to do with the investment, once the project is over. No more worries of scaling up and out the infrastructure, after user increases. Just enjoying pure joy of ‘Pay per Transactions', while leaving all these worries to 'cloud vendor'.
Hope this comparison helps more, to understand ‘Cloud Computing’.
With these posts, I'm planning to wind-up discussing 'cloud computing' at a high level. And in next post we will try to reach more closer to this cloud.
Earlier Post: Part 3
Imagine, ‘Tata Motors’ has just launched a nation-wide ‘Car-Rental’ service. Assume that with that service, renting a car has become dirt cheap. And they are passing cost benefits, of their scale of operations, to consumers. Assume, it has become so cheap that people are giving second thought before buying a car.
The repercussions…?? Definitely, you will be more than happy. You are going to save money for every imaginable reason. You don’t have to buy the car. No worry of fixing accidental repairs. No more Parking Tickets. No worry of depreciation. No need to hire the driver. No need to spend money on maintenance of the car. No need to buy insurance. No worry of resale hassle, and its valuation. Pure joy of paying, by “per km”. How does it feel? No doubt. Comfortable. (Rather I’m feeling, that it is such a great idea, I should discuss it with Ratan, Anil or Mukesh) :-)
Fun apart. But if you just think aloud, ‘Cloud Computing’ might be beneficial in similar ways, in days to come. It will keep you away from the hassle of buying hardware and licenses before starting a new project. No more IT hardware / helpdesk-support personnel required. No more patch management. No more worries of hardware upgradation and license renewal with every passing year. No more depreciating assets. No more questions of what to do with the investment, once the project is over. No more worries of scaling up and out the infrastructure, after user increases. Just enjoying pure joy of ‘Pay per Transactions', while leaving all these worries to 'cloud vendor'.
Hope this comparison helps more, to understand ‘Cloud Computing’.
With these posts, I'm planning to wind-up discussing 'cloud computing' at a high level. And in next post we will try to reach more closer to this cloud.
Earlier Post: Part 3
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Cloud Computing. Concept behind it. (Azure - Part 3)
How many times you have deleted older files and folders, just to make space for new files and apps? What if you don’t have to do it from today onwards?
The concept of cloud computing is very simple. Imagine you are working with a very low end PC. For example, let’s say there’s no sufficient hard disk space. Even the processor, RAM and every other aspect of configuration is too basic. But you want to host your application that requires high memory, disk-space and bandwidth.
Here, the solution would be to connect your PC to internet. Connect to a super-computer, and host your application. Very simple. Isn’t it?
Taking it forward, this discussed, so called supercomputer, is nothing, but a vast network of machines, providing combined storage, memory and infrastructure. Lets see if this diagram will be able to explain it at high level.
It also takes its own backups at regular intervals and if one machine fails, another is swapped-in, without user knowing anything about it at all.
We’ll dive in more details in next post. Till that time watch dilbert on ‘Cloud Security’.
Links to related posts:
Link to Part 1
Link to Part 2
Next Part
The concept of cloud computing is very simple. Imagine you are working with a very low end PC. For example, let’s say there’s no sufficient hard disk space. Even the processor, RAM and every other aspect of configuration is too basic. But you want to host your application that requires high memory, disk-space and bandwidth.
Here, the solution would be to connect your PC to internet. Connect to a super-computer, and host your application. Very simple. Isn’t it?
Taking it forward, this discussed, so called supercomputer, is nothing, but a vast network of machines, providing combined storage, memory and infrastructure. Lets see if this diagram will be able to explain it at high level.
It also takes its own backups at regular intervals and if one machine fails, another is swapped-in, without user knowing anything about it at all.
We’ll dive in more details in next post. Till that time watch dilbert on ‘Cloud Security’.
Links to related posts:
Link to Part 1
Link to Part 2
Next Part
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