Cloud Computing-The Buzz word

The Background


When I had invited the late Mr. Meherman Kelkar to as a guest speaker for our students during which he had mentioned this concept of “CLOUD COMPUTING” to me. This was in the year 2008. He also made a statement about the fact that “CLOUD COMPUTING” is the future. I was quite excited about this new concept and decided to find out more information about this unique concept. Imagining a life without the stress of maintaining servers and have somebody else to maintain it on your behalf sounded too good.


The AIH Mailing solution: When, I was told to explore a mailing solution for the newly setup AIH in April 2007, as I was browsing through the various possibilities and cost implications, I came across Google apps for education website which spoke about an email solution.





After some research, I decided to register the AIH domain for Google apps mailing solution and now it’s been close to 5 years, the Google apps mailing solution has been working without any glitches.


As, we are an education institute and have an edu.in domain extension, we had the entire mailing solution coming to us Free of cost. On this mailing system, we maintain about close to 300 email id’s and each one enjoying a inbox space of about 25 GB each.


This was my first experience with the Cloud Computing concept. Lets now get down to the basics of Cloud Computing to understand it better.




The Concept: Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility(like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet).





The Types of Cloud Computing:
Cloud Computing can be classified into 4 types on the basis of location where the cloud is hosted:


 Public Cloud: Computing infrastructure is hosted at the vendor’s premises. The customer has no visibility over the location of the cloud computing infrastructure. The computing infrastructure is shared between organizations.


 Private Cloud: Computing architecture is dedicated to the customer and is not shared with other organisations. They are expensive and are considered more secure than Public Clouds. Private clouds may be externally hosted ones as well as in premise hosted clouds.
 Hybrid Cloud: Organisations host some critical, secure applications in private clouds. The not so critical applications are hosted in the public cloud. The combination is known as Hybrid Cloud. Cloud bursting is the term used to define a system where the organisation uses its own infrastructure for normal usage, but cloud is used for peak loads.


 Community Cloud: The cloud infrastructure is shared between the organizations of the same community. For example, all the government agencies in a city can share the same cloud but not the non government agencies.


 Infrastructure as a Service(IAAS): Hardware related services are provided using the principles of Cloud Computing. These include disk storage and virtual servers. Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Servers are some of the leading vendors.


Platform as a service(PAAS): Development platforms are provided on the cloud. The platforms may not be compatible with each other. Wikipedia puts it appropriately as ‘Platform as a service’ (PaaS) the delivery of a computing platform and solution stack as a service.PaaS offerings facilitate deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software and provisioning hosting capabilities, providing all of the facilities required to support the complete life cycle of building and delivering web applications and services entirely available from the Internet. PaaS offerings may include facilities for application design, application development, testing, deployment and hosting as well as application services such as team collaboration, web service integration and marshalling, database integration, security, scalability, storage, persistence, state management, application versioning, application instrumentation and developer community facilitation. These services may be provisioned as an integrated solution over the web.


Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure and Saleforce’s force.com are the leaders in this category.


 Software as a service (SAAS): This is the most common form of cloud computing which we see in action. It is a complete software offering on the cloud. They are accessed by the customers on pay per use basis. Saleforce.com’s CRM, Google apps etc are the prime example of such a service. Salesforce.com’s CRM, Gmail and Hotmail are prime examples of SAAS.


The Applications:
Leveraging on the Growth of Internet Bandwidth: Internationally, over the years, the Internet bandwidth prices has been dropping resulting the low cost of Internet bandwidth been made available to the consumers/institutions. The concept of Cloud computing will only work well if the end user enjoys a uninterrupted Broadband Internet connectivity.


The Reduced Cost Implication and improved Bottom lines: In case of change of a corporate email system, the cost savings would be in a tune of millions of rupees.


For Eg: On a conventional email system would cost Rs.6000/- per email id per year.For 300 email id's it would be Rs.18,00,000/- per year.


A shift to a Google app cloud would cost less than Rs.2000/- per mail id per year. For 300 email id's the cost would be less than Rs.6,00,000/- per year. Thats a huge saving. Isn't it?


My Next Blog would be an extension to Cloud computing concept on " Anywhere Front Desk". Do keep reading !