What exactly is Cloud Computing?

The cloud consists of shared computers on the Internet that are used for data processing. The cloud extends the basic principal of the Internet, as a shared network, by adding shared computers.

There are a number of reasons why an organisation might use cloud computing instead of having their own computers in their own data centre including:

• The cloud computers are on the Internet and are easily accessible by users who are also on the Internet. The classic example of these are applications such as web sites
• The usage of the computers is charged according to use, usually according to levels of CPU, Disk and network, and there are no capital or upfront costs
• The computers are offered as a managed service and the provider is responsible for installing them, managing power consumption, software installations and patches, backups and dealing with replacements when the computers break down. There is no need to have a team of local IT specialists just employed to keep the computers running
• The systems are massively scalable as the application grows and needs more computing power, more CPUs are automatically assigned

So let's consider two of the main offerings on the market, Amazon and Microsoft:

Amazon have a comprehensive cloud offering based on virtual machines that run one or more of your applications. The virtual machines run in an Amazon data centre on Amazon managed computers. Describing it just as a virtual machine over simplifies what is really on offer because there is a lot of associated software and infrastructure that make cloud applications a reality including:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2): Web services that allow a developer to manage capacity by starting and stopping new server instances as demand changes
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3): A storage mechanism based on web services that that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web
• Amazon Simple DB: A simple database that provides query and index capabilities
• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS): A web service based MySQL relational database
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS): A queuing services that allows data messages to be sent between computers
• And much more

A lot of the services on offer are used by Amazon themselves for their own web sites and so they have certainly been proved in the real world. For more information see: http://aws.amazon.com/products/

Microsoft's cloud offering is called Azure. It is also based on virtual machines internally but their use is not explicit. Instead the developer creates a .NET application and deploys it to the cloud which dynamically takes care of how many CPUs etc are used according to the scalability requirements of the application. Azure supports a fairly large subset of .NET 4.0 and provides additional supporting technologies to help develop truly distributed cloud applications, including:

• SQL Azure: A cloud based relational database based on SQL Server
• SQL Azure Data Sync: A bi-directional synchronisation mechanism between SQL Azure and an on premises SQL Server databases
• Azure platform AppFabric: Contains facilities to aid the development of distributed cloud applications including a Service Bus for exchanging messages between cloud and on premises applications and authentication and workflow facilities

Both Amazon and Microsoft have spent significant sums in data centres and cloud software and both have comprehensive and impressive offerings. Both offer similar facilities in concept but quite different in detail.

In summary, the cloud offers companies 'pay as you go' computing and Internet power and the competition is heating up for the major providers in this sector. Cloud computing is in its infancy, but there is no doubt that its use will grow significantly over the next few years and that competition will be fierce. Only time will tell how this all pans out.

To discover more about Cloud Computing and how we can help you with SharePoint consultancy, website and intranet development, support and hosting services, please contact us at andrew.chalmers@ballardchalmers.com or call 01342 410223.

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