Ontologies are Fun.


As usual, relatively early (but not too early) in the lifecycle of a technology, there is a plethora of terms that is created to describe each individual vendor's category. This ratatouille of terms needs to be sorted out so that we can better understand what is what. Groupings are formed, complex ontologies are sketched and simpler ontologies are created.

This is where we are with Cloud Computing. On The Wisdom of Clouds, two such ontologies are drawn. The UCSB is simpler, the more complex from Hoff possibly more useful.

Here they are:





I wonder if the former misses two boxes that have been interesting to me:




The importance of each of these concepts is that adoption to cloud computing will be dependent on the ease-of-management, security, governance, and integratability of the cloud services.

More on how to get on the cloud easily later.

Cloud Day (Groundhog Day)

Many years ago, we (at Sun) were thinking about the logical extension of the concept "The Network is the Computer" and surmising that if resources and applications and data could exist and be "processed" in the network (and not locally), then effectively we would be able to order exactly the right amount of computer we needed. Sometimes we called it Utility Computing. Other times, Grid (to refer to the large complex problems that required clustering of many large servers, something Sun sells well), but now, seven to ten years later, the concept has been redefined as Cloud Computing.

So what is cloud computing? Why are so many vendors talking about it. ZDnet's Cath Everett does a nice job of defining it. She says,

"...cloud computing is a form of outsourcing by which vendors supply computing services to lots of customers over the internet. These services can range from applications, such as customer relationship management, to infrastructure, such as storage and the provision of development platforms.

The services are provided by massively scalable datacenters running hundreds of thousands of CPUs as a single compute engine, using virtualization technology. That approach means workloads are distributed across multiple machines — which can also be located in multiple datacenters — and capacity can be allocated or scaled back according to a customer's needs.

Moreover, because applications are multi-tenant in nature — multiple instances of the same package that can be executed on the same machine — system resources can be shared among a large pool of users, which reduces costs."

She goes on to say that SaaS is a subset of Cloud.
Grid is a subset of Cloud.
Utility computing is a subset of Cloud.

Another visually simple video (which oversimplifies) is here.


Sometimes, the easiest way to define a service is by showing the most real and telling example in use today. Amazon's EC2 cloud service for all intents and purposes is the standard. Simply, it allows any entity to buy any amount of computing resource and run just enough of its core applications, remotely, and in exchange it pays a fee to Amazon. There are no servers or IT equipment whatsoever locally and the resources/applications are ordered in a flexible manner, somewhat like the vision we really had in the nineties at Sun.

Groundhog Day, indeed.