While companies try to solve cloud computing issues the
market remains some way off maturity, writes Danny
Bradbury.
Gartner recently suggested that cloud computing as used for
service-enabled applications
still had seven years until it reached market maturity. Some of
the problems it faces include scalability, interoperability, and
security, not to mention more business-focused issues.
For example, what is the most sensible way to pay for these
services? Companies are piling considerable resources into research
and development to solve some of these issues.
HP, Intel and Yahoo created a research effort last July,
partnering with several academic institutions around the world.
And the
European Union has also been involved in driving forward some
research designed to answer questions such as how clouds can be
made more interoperable.
John Manley, director of the automated infrastructure laboratory
at HP labs, pinpoints scalability as a particularly challenging
issue.
Conventional environment
In a conventional multi-tenant hosted environment, you might
simply use a copy of an application for each user, to provide the
necessary isolation that customers needed. "Imagine that this
becomes a popular service with a million users. Can you imagine
having a million instances of that service?" he asks.
"You now have to start thinking about being multi-tenant not in
the infrastructure, but at the application level. Now, all the
isolation has to be built into the application, and that is a much
trickier thing to do."
Large-scale SaaS companies have been dealing with such problems
commercially, which will help to inform research and development in
this area. But the industry has to develop to the point where this
becomes a natural way of doing things, he adds. The cloud isn't
singular, of course.
We already have different ones from a variety of vendors. As
they become more commercially appealing, we must avoid the vendor
lock-in that we saw with the original 'cloud' - the mainframe.
"We have a set of isolated clouds at the moment, and we are a
long way off having a holistic, overarching cloud out there that I
can load my data into anywhere I want and access it from anywhere I
want," says Alan Priestley, strategic marketing manager at
Intel.
There are some moves afoot to try to sort this problem. For
example, the European Union has shelled out €17m on an IBM-led
project called Resources and Services Virtualisation without
Barriers (RESERVOIR). The initiative, led by IBM, aims to enable IT
services to be moved between different machines in the cloud to
accommodate fail-over processes, and workload management.
Remotely mirrored servers
We have already seen this to some extent, with conventional
remotely mirrored servers, for example. But they don't have
anything like the same flexibility. Solutions such as VMware's
VMotion move virtual machines around between physical devices
automatically, but try moving those virtual machines between
different companies' hypervisors in remotely connected
datacentres.
"If you have a standard communication protocol across these two
clouds, where you can then communicate with the handlers of the
other cloud, for the right security, networking, availability, and
orchestration, only then can you make it happen," says Radha
Ratnaparkhi, director of commercial systems at IBM. In early March,
the company demonstrated live migration of SAP applications across
remote IBM systems.
These technical challenges may be daunting enough, but they are
also intimately linked to more business-focused issues. Dr Marcel
Kunze works at the Steinbuch Centre for Computing, one of six
research centres of excellence around the world that are supporting
the HP, Intel, and Yahoo research effort.
Once you have figured out how to move the data around
effectively, you have to make sure that you can stop it from moving
just anywhere, he points out. "It may be important for policy
reasons that data has to stay in Europe and not move to the US, for
example," he says. "There are no methods available at the moment to
define the location of that storage."
How do you pay for it?
Then when all that has been worked out, we have to consider the
pure economics of cloud computing. How do you pay for it?
Ratnaparkhi cites several potential models, including pay as you
go, and a model that enables users to bid for time in the cloud. HP
has already run trials in which people wanting to render animations
could bid for time in this way.
Ultimately, we hope that the cloud will become a more ubiquitous
part of everyday computing life. But we still have some way to go
before the market as a whole latches on to it. Creating confidence
among enterprise users requires some hefty research work first.
While the white coats labour in the labs, we'll wait patiently, and
continue to dabble.