It’s great to see history repeating itself with the (re)introduction of cloud based computing

One area that has generated real interest during my current round of Windows 7 seminars is around cloud based computing. Or more specifically, in the context of my seminar, Microsoft’s BPOS SaaS and Azure Platform. Everyone had heard of “cloud” but many thought it was done with smoke and mirrors by the marketing department. It is however, more mature than you may think.

It's funny how things turn out, as a believer in fate, I should have realised the day that I was sacked from McDonalds that life had something more fun than upselling to a large portion of fries in store. In case you're interested, I was sacked after an argument about Wham with my manager. Really!  Luckily I  fell into a TV repair apprenticeship, in those days, TV engineers became computer engineers as we knew about soldering irons. In my case, I was taken on as part computer engineer part account manager. Earning £6,000pa + car.

When TV's Blue Screen of Death, who ya' going to call?

Then, we sold mainframe emulators; "cheaper" CPM based micros were used in place of expensive terminals to connect via 2400 baud synchronous lines to mainframes,  mainframes that were often located in the cloud. Of course we didn't call it  "cloud based mainframing", they were in computer bureaus.  Many organisations simply didn't have  the capital to purchase mainframe computing or the skills to support them. There was no MCSE for the IBM 3x mainframe. It was the norm to rent services, often on a time share basis. Jump forward 24 years and you could be forgiven for thinking we are back were we started. Introducing cloud computing. But why? Computing has never been cheaper and there is no shortage of skills.

Cloud based Mainframing of the 1980s

Rest in Peace - The CapEx

An interesting anomaly of mergers and acquisitions means that I've actually worked for QA for 10 years longer than it has existed.  Always a talking point on bid presentations.  One of my many roles in that time included looking after the internal IT of a three centre training business.  Presented with a CapEx, as any true accountant would, our FD would roll his eyes, scrutinise every word of the request for a shiny new Compaq Proliant before signing with a look that suggested he'd spotted one of his kidneys on the purchase order form. With a move to the cloud, we will be filling in fewer CapEx requests. Time to get to know Mr Operational Expenditure. We don't need to purchase, house and service as much computing hardware and software as we once did. By signing up to the cloud, we have access to the latest and greatest capabilities and scale, on demand. Even the government are playing, Communications minister Lord Carter has said that "substantial savings" can be made in public spending by building a government-wide cloud computing platform. Enter the so called "G Cloud". Check this out for more details.

What does the cloud look like?

If we were to visit Microsoft's cloud base, we'd actually be in a global data centre, housed in highly water cooled warehouses somewhere in the world. In the UK, our closest MS coloured cloud is in Ireland. Each warehouse is full of steel shipping containers, each stuffed with Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition physical servers.  The Datacenter edition has unlimited virtual instance licenses so each container could have 1000's of virtual servers. Each server in managed by System Centre. Each steel container is sealed shut with defective servers mapped as bad, in the same way we did with bad sectors 20 years ago.  When the proportion of defective servers gets to a predetermined level, it is lifted and replaced. Expect to find me with a can opener hanging around by the Microsoft bins this summer.

 

What shape is a cloud?

The cloud is not a single shape, but rather a collection of computing, storage, platform services and applications.  At its simplest level, you'll find a Windows or Linux Server in the cloud that you can use almost as if it were local. A cloud service on the other hand can be thought of as functionality (rather than O/S) that is hosted in a vendors datacenter and delivered via the Internet -  these services expose an API or two. You can think of an API as a lever by which you can exploit that service in your own applications. Twitter is a good example as access to these APIs has allowed third parties to develop Twitter functionality into their own applications. Tweetdeck for example.  Other examples might include Apples MobileMe, Flikr the photo sharing application, Microsoft's SkyDrive and Mesh are all describable as Cloud Services. Mesh is very usful for those of us with several PCs.

Shape 1: In for a penny, infastructure (as a service) IaaS

Infrastructure as a Service does what it says on the can. Through the power of server level virtualisation, we can provision servers or computing capacity in the cloud, on demand and by the hour. A sort of utility computing. You can scale up (and down) as your needs change. Without risking capital on on-premise hardware. If, for example, we are about to launch a new product that could require a lot of server access, by putting it in the cloud, we can scale up or down depending of the success (or otherwise) of the launch.  IaaS vendors will often allow you to upload your own VHD file onto their cloud. We are then responsible for managing those servers as if they were local to us.  Interested? Thought you would be, have a look at Amazon, the pricing option is worth a look, remember this is a CapEx free zone.  Gogrid is also worth a look. I love the way their documentations suggests that you "mount your infinite volume of cloud storage". We have come a long way from the 5Mb drives from when I started. ElasticHosts is a cloud infrastructure company, hosting Linux and Windows virtual machines (on top of Linux KVM Hypervisor). You manage your servers through a control panel or an API. Think about that, you can create an IT environment that can respond dynamically to the needs of our business, from just 4p per hour. Instant capacity, no commitment, globally accessible. Available when your servers are full. I wonder if this would work in the classroom for labs?

Shape 2: But wait, there's more, Software as a Service (SaaS)

SaaS takes the cloud further; imagine if we set up a small business, one of our first priorities might be to get access to email. So we'll stick with the market leader and buy a copy of Exchange Server, we'll need a server, a copy of Windows 2008 (not R2 as that doesn't work with Exchange 2007). Oh and we'll need to secure it and, well you get the idea... Business is good, we need to scale up,  we need a bigger server, more bandwidth and more licenses (CALS). How good would it be if we could buy Exchange as a hosted service, buying just the services we need. Well we can. As its name implies Software as a Service is, software delivered as a errm, Service. Microsoft, with its BPOS suite can provide Exchange, SharePoint, Systems Center, CRM... as hosted services. Pay a monthly fee and you are away. Salesforce and Google have SaaS solution. Google's recently trailed a netbook with Chrome at its core, it relies on the cloud for all its functionality. But it does boot in <8 seconds. Google claim that two million businesses are already using Google's cloud based software, software that ranges from email through to document creation. We now have spreadsheets in the cloud.

 

Shape 3: Software + Services - Platform in the cloud and the back office

The Chrome example is an interesting one, reliant on cloud based services and locally installed resources. As I blogged way back in 2008, S+S is a favourite for Microsoft as it helps preserve the locally installed software requirement (and revenue). A reporter asked me recently how the cloud would impact Windows 7. My answer: Windows 7 may well become the portal to cloud based services whether the services are on premise or in the cloud. With Silverlight as the user interface glue perhaps?

Microsoft was late to market with cloud based offerings; Amazon and Google were already in the game when Microsoft decided to play. But that's not unusual for Microsoft, after all Gem and OS2 arrived way before Windows, WordPerfect and WordStar before Office. Microsoft has invested a lot of money here, not least in what we'll call the "Operating System for the Cloud" and what they call Windows Azure. Windows Azure provides a set of services that allows development, management and hosting of applications in the cloud.  Azure provides access to Compute, Storage and Fabric. The fabric piece being the hosting environment or infrastructure, automatically managing resources, load balancing and replication. Azure went live the same month I clocked up 24 years service. What goes around comes around.

My colleagues here at QA have been worked with Microsoft directly on various Azure projects. I provided support to the Adrian Jakeman who created this nifty little video. When I say support, think less Windows Azure deep technical and more "would you like sugar in that Mr Jakeman, sir?"

Shape 4: TBA

Watch this space !

 

A cloud a day

We now live in an era where everyone expects "stuff" (services) to be available irrespective of device or location. To business the benefits are obvious,  reduced capital expenditure, someone else owns the tough part of the SLA, scale up (and down) as the economy ebbs and flows, resilience and global access. It that same 24 years I have also managed all of our trainers, the BIGGEST challenge was (in the days of NT4 anyway) was the time it took to build classrooms on a Friday night. If it was an SMS course you were talking ten hours - minimum. Imagine if we could just host all our labs in the cloud. Turning them on and off as required. In fact Microsoft have started to make some of their labs available in the cloud via Hyper-V.  The time and capital savings could be significant BUT only if the community like that way of working. Will we like a netbook that only works if it can find the Internet or having our data crunched and stored in some one else's steel shipping container. Well I'll answer that fully in another 24 years.

Oh and the guy who had me fired from McDonald's, I rediscovered him a year or two ago, working in a kebab shop in Macclesfield - it just felt so good... I still maintain that Club Tropicana is rubbish!

 

 

 

Speak soon