Coming Attractions to a Cloud Near You

Discrete and Routine Uses

Today's Cloud are used mostly for two type of scenarios. One is the "Cloud Natives" where new ventures would start their computing infrastructure in the Cloud. The other is one-off projects like the New York Times digitizing its archive using Cloud Computing. These provide real use cases with tangible benefits and help to deepen the supporting eco-system for Cloud.

Industrial Strength Applications

As more established enterprises with large customer bases start to consider Cloud Computing, abilities in these areas are likely to propel the industry forward.

Deep Monitoring Tools: As the recent Amazon outage experience shows, the ability to identify the source and scale of a problem is something that few people have had to deal with until now. While Netflix is cobbling together various services for this purpose, they have noted that no single vendor provides the level of granularity and integrated view that meet the needs at their scale today.

Cloud Bursting: enterprises have expressed a good deal of interests in Private Cloud to keep part of the data and processing in-house due to regulatory and other considerations. At the same time, the ability to tap into an external Cloud on an as-needed basis, aka Cloud Bursting, offers a rather compelling degree of flexibility and cost advantage that will likely become the norm. Eucalyptus Systems has been a forerunner on both private cloud and cloud bursting.

Verticalized Industry Value-Add: Network service providers, e.g. telco such as BT and Verizon, are exploring industry-specific services that would offer differentiated Cloud solutions from the current offerings from the likes of Amazon, Google, Rackspace, and Microsoft. Some of the potential markets that have been named include financial markets, global commerce, consumer package goods, government, and health care.

Cloud Standards and Watering Holes

Talking about Standards

It is a delicate issue. On one hand, Cloud is still evolving rapidly so participants do not want to commit to a standard in order to avoid a potential VHS vs Beta-like confrontation. On the other, without standards, it is difficult to get the enterprise-class users with the enterprise-class budget to actively engage with Cloud.

For now, a growing number of talking shops have been established each with different focuses.

• ATIS Cloud Services Forum: www.atis.org/cloud/index.asp
• Cloud Security Alliance: cloudsecurityalliance.org
• Cloud Standards Customer Council: cloudstandardscustomercouncil.org
• Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Cloud Management Standards: dmtf.org
• IEEE Cloud Computing Standards Study Group: www.computer.org/portal/web/sab/cloud
• Open Datacenter Alliance: www.opendatacenteralliance.org

Meeting Cloudsters

Similarly, a number of industry conferences and regional groups are creating Cloud related activities to both engage with the early adopters and to evangelize Cloud use cases.

• Carrier Cloud Forum (Interop): www.interop.com/lasvegas/conference/carrier-cloud-forum.php
• Cloud Computing World (CeBIT): www.cebit.de/en/about-the-trade-show/programme/highlights/cloud-computing-world
• Cloud Camp: www.cloudcamp.org
• Cloud Connect: www.cloudconnectevent.com
• CTIA Wireless: www.ctiawireless.com/exhibit/index.cfm/cloud-computing-pavilion
• Mobile Cloud Computing Forum: www.mobilecloudcomputingforum.com
• Silicon Valley Cloud Computing Group: www.meetup.com/cloudcomputing

In short, a new eco-system is literally taking shape before our eyes.

Cloud Computing for the Rest of Us

Use Cases

Given Cloud's nascent nature, there is a need to identify use case to help people to both understand Cloud Computing and see what are the appropriate Cloud applications to build. The Cloud Computing Use Case Discussion Group was formed to capture specific use cases as a way to describe and benchmark the emerging Cloud usage in the wild. Their most recent v4 white paper (link below) is worth a look.

At the very fundamental level, some combination of the four potentially actors - End user, Enterprise, Public Cloud, and Private Cloud - constitute a Cloud usage. There are two scenarios that I believe will become increasingly prevalent over time. One is the idea of "cloud bursting" whereby demand spike is met by accessing the public cloud. An use case was an insurance company expecting to process a large volume of claim after a natural disaster. Instead of putting the extra load onto the existing infrastructure and causing a system wide impact on other businesses and regions, it used the public cloud to handle excess traffic instead of investing in additional internal IT infrastructure that would have sat idle after the event.

The second scenario is to use the cloud for machine-to-machine process with no end user in mind. In the use case, an agency needs to conduct computing intensive processes over a growing large dataset. Instead of building up a physical infrastructure for the job, it was able to achieve the same result at 50% of the cost and without the setup time require for their own datacenter.

A Business Tool

The hot issues surrounding Cloud Computing are not technical in nature. For example, security and SLA (Service Level Agreement) speak to the nature of the user's business processes and needs. Only the business operators have the appropriate context to determine if a vendor's security and SLA are sufficient.

Newly enacted legal and professional requirements related to the location of the data and users are likely to be felt by enterprises as they expand market coverage through the Cloud. Different countries and regions have regulations on where specific data can reside physically. Similarly, contractual agreements such as digital rights management will also determine where and how a consumer can access information delivered through cloud.

http://cloudusecases.org/