Monthly Archives: August 2009

Is the Cloud as the vendors are claiming?

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IT news from Australia is presenting a work made by the UNSW School of Computer Science. In this study they try to verify if the Cloud is as the Vendors are claiming that it is: elastic, reliable, dynamic, fault tolerant, high available..

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/153451,stress-tests-rain-on-amazons-cloud.aspx

These are very interesting points and independent tests are fundamental to create trust among Cloud users and providers.

Although I think this kind of test should be more focused on specific applications. As  studies show, some of the potential problems found on the Cloud could be solved by the developers.

Using these ideas as starting point I’m working on a project that should be presented as a parallel event on the CloudViews.Org Cloud Computing Conference – 2010. This project, and the whole CloudViews.Org Cloud Computing Conference 2010 will be presented very soon, but If any one is interested in these topics, feel free to contact me directly.

Amazon introduces the AWS Private Cloud, and the question that arises is if this new service enables the deployment of real Private Cloud..

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Amazon has introduced today the new AWS Virtual Private Cloud service, more details on it could be found here: http://aws.amazon.com/vpc

On the follow up of this new service, some doubts have arisen about the real type of the cloud built with this new service, and also if this kind of cloud could even be difined as Private Clouds.

Using the NIST definition:

” Private cloud. The cloud infrastructure is operated solely for an organization. It may be managed by the organization or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise. ”

It’s very clear, a Private Cloud could be on premise or off premise. The next question is what should be considered the premises of the cloud. Should it be the wall of the datacenter, the box of the server or the VM where the OS is running? For one company their premises could be a single room, whereas to another it could be the entire building, in the cloud computing paradigm the private cloud is, in my perspective, a sandbox, which has boundaries well definite and on which we trust. These boundaries are the set of features that are available (CPU, network, storage, development API, etc) and the trust comes by means of contracts, cloud provider reputation, etc…

It’s easy to understand that this kind of definition are not closed to discussion, but in my prespective, the service introduced by Amazon should be consider a very interesting tool to build effective Private Clouds.