A Cloudy Day
Not so much a comment on the weather as on some prognostication around the evolution of cloud computing…
1) Today the term ‘cloud’ doesn’t mean a whole lot. It’s a nice catchy phrase for what many companies have been doing for a long time. Build a data center, outsource processing cycle and storage capacity to a variety of consumers, charge for it. Make sure it is connected to a network so the service they have outsourced can be ubiquitously accessed from a variety of locations, and allow the compute and storage capacity to be re-purposed.
2) What seems to be changing is the rate of change. The pace or velocity so to speak. i.e. To add a consumer to a hosted data center model in the mid to late 90’s involved buying a ‘cage’ and putting into that cage lots of physical stuff like routers, servers, storage arrays, load balancers, switches, firewalls, tape drives, terminal servers, etc. This meant that the deployment time was measured in months, weeks at best, to turn a new service up. Even a simple capacity add required procurement, cabling, electricians, rack mounting stuff, etc. The fastest single activity in the workflow could be measured in days.
3) Time compressed. Server Virtualization compressed the time frame in which a ‘server’ (err, VM) could be turned up, cloned, copied, uniquely provisioned, et cetera. This created strain on the other areas of traditionally physical infrastructure such as storage, load balancers, and security. They have responded and replied to this with their own unique forms of virtualization and there are emergent provisioning platforms for enterprises and service providers that automate some of the monotonous workload tasks to speed up the delivery and thus efficacy of the entire service.
Leaving us where we are today, but what about moving forward?
4) Enterprises will build mini-clouds. As time compresses and workload can be rapidly re-provisioned/re-purposed in an increasingly automated fashion the aggregate number of CPU Cores/Sockets and Memory that will be necessary to support the peak aggregate workload will decrease within the cloud.
5) Service Providers will move into higher revenue cloud models as they continue to try to extract a higher revenue per square foot or per kilowatt/hour out of a hosting facility. This will be driven by shareholders and market consolidation as well as the number of facilities that will come available to the SPs as they consolidate their own DC infrastructures.
6) Hypervisors will become THE way of defining the abstraction between physical and virtual within a server and there will be a standardization of the hypervisor ‘interface’ between the VM and the hypervisor. This will allow a VM created on Xen to move to VMWare or Hyper-V and so on. Management capability and system-wide integration will become the key differentiators for this piece of technology.
7) Service Providers will scale their cloud managed application/hosting/hypervisor offerings out initially by taking ‘low hanging fruit’ applications like email, web, call managers but will then want to continue the expansion into larger enterprise customers and more custom applications. The standardized hypervisor will enable workload portability and the SPs will try to acquire more customers.
8) IP Addressing will move to IPv6 or have IPv4 RFCs standardized that allow for a global address device/VM ID within the addressing space and a location/provider sensitive ID that will allow for workload to be moved from one provider to another without changing the client’s host stack or known IP address ‘in flight’. Here’s an example from my friend Dino.
9) This will allow workload portability between Enterprise Clouds and Service Provider Clouds.
10) The SP community will embrace this and start aggressively trying to capture as much footprint as possible so they can fill their data centers to near capacity allowing for them to have the maximum efficiency within their operation. This holds to my rule that ‘The Value of Virtualization is compounded by the number of devices virtualized’.
11) Someone will write a DNS or a DNS Coupled Workload exchange. This will allow the enterprise to effectively automate the bidding of workload allocation against some number or pool of Service Providers who are offering them the compute, storage, and network capacity at a given price. The faster and more seamless the above technologies make the shift of workload from one provider to another the simpler it is in the end for an exchange or market-based system to be the controlling authority for the distribution of workload and thus $$$‘s to the provider who is most capable of processing the workload.
12) Skynet becomes self aware.
Posted by Douglas Gourlay at 12:24PM PST
Douglas Gourlay Jul 16, 2008
A great artlice recommended to me via James Urquhart via Twitter on Enterprise Clouds- http://fountnhead.blogspot.com/2008/07/is-internal-cloud-oxymoron.html
dg