So You’re Renting Xen Condo’s in the Cloud, Big Deal, What’s Your Next Act?

Here’s another quote from the article, “21 Experts Define Cloud Computing”

“The ‘cloud’ model initially has focused on making the hardware layer consumable as on-demand compute and storage capacity. This is an important first step, but for companies to harness the power of the cloud, complete application infrastructure needs to be easily configured, deployed, dynamically-scaled and managed in these virtualized hardware environments.”

Kirill Sheynkman

I like this quote too – but for different reasons than may be first apparent.  We’re watching something evolve at light speed; the cloud.  And the definition above is now taken for granted.  I should be able to dynamically, upon request, add stuff to my compute environment.  Big deal.  How do we take advantage of it?  There’s a big difference between a ‘cloud aware’ application and an application built for the cloud from the ground up.

Horizontal vs Vertical

For an application to take advantage of the cloud, as loosely defined above, it must not only scale vertically, but horizontally as well.  The advent of cloud computing doesn’t obviate the need to write well written systems – systems that take advantage of local compute resources.  Horizontal scalability introduces another axis; “How do we make sure that our application scales just by throwing more machines, disk or network at it?”  The answer is just as complex, if not more, than all of the science required to build a well behaving, vertical scaling application.  It’s more complex because a product has to take into account things it usually depends upon the client to provide via 3rd party products.  Products like cache, storage, bus, management, etc.

Being ‘Cloud Aware’ is Not The Same Thing

So you can run your app in a data center – does this make your app cloud aware?  I guess so but it certainly doesn’t take advantage of elastic resources.  And chances are, that ‘cloud aware’ app you’ve got running in your private, public, or hybrid cloud doesn’t have a pricing model that’s cloud friendly.  There’s another evolution that’s required to fully support cloud deployments, and that’s a cloud aware pricing model.  Try scaling to 1,000’s of cores with a traditional, crossing the chasm, we’ll sell you a license vendor, and the second brick wall you’ll run into after not being able to scale horizontally will be the license fee.  Closely followed by the ever increasing support and maintenance.

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