I have attended the Recent Business Technology Summit on Cloud Computing held at Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore and got a chance to attend a session with Amazon Web Services team. The most interesting feature attracted me is the concept of "elastic IP". I wanted to share my thoughts on a practical situation that may come up when enterprises adopt to the cloud computing world.
Introduction
Amazon is one of the leader in providing Cloud Computing Services in the industry. Their services include flexible IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. You can find more information about Amazon Web Services from here. The below discussions are specific to the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) features of amazon services.
What does elasticity mean?
The coolest benefits cloud services offering you are the "Scalability" and "High Availability" of applications. Let us review how IT is managing these issues today.
Have you ever faced the "scalability" and "availability" problems with your IT applications?
I guess most of the people would answer "yes" to this question.
So what would you usually do in such cases?
You may do;
1. application fine tuning.
2. may add more memory to the server.
3. may add more server clusters to support the ever demanding user needs.
4. Lot of explanations to your boss.
What if your "availability" issues are seasonal? meaning your application demands more availability during a particular season for e.g. "income tax filing once in a year", or "yearly medical annual enrollment" etc. So what would you do in such cases?
I would scale up the infrastructure during this period and scale down when the demands are low. But most of the organization,the infrastructure change management process would not take place overnight. It required careful planning, budgeting, resource allocation, procurement and vendor management etc.
So in summary, what are the challenges you may face to meet scalability and availability requirements?
1. Increased cost of Infrastructure and resources. You need strong business justification to add more infrastructure.
2. You may need steady incremental upgrade/downgrade of IT infrastructure depending on demand.
3. Better and controlled planning on procurement process.
4. Meet the demands of the business spontaneousely.
This is the space where the Cloud Application providers are looking for a business opportunity. The coolest features the cloud world offering you is the illusion of "Infinite Computing Resources" with "Pay as you go" model. What this means that whenever your application demands more and more availability, the cloud services automatically bring up as many servers as required without affecting the availability of the application and also when the application become less popular, the additional servers are automatically scaled down to the sufficient size as required.
Initially you can decide the number of servers required for your application and then setup a higher threshold value say 80%, so whenever application usage goes above 80% the cloud services may start the additional servers to improve the availability. Similary you can set up a lower threshold value say 25% to start scaling down the additional servers added to your application cluster. This concept is called the elastic IP.
The most tempting offer though is the "pay as you go" offer. You need not pay for the additional servers if your application is not using it. Pay only when the business demands it. The other fact is that the cost of hosting application would be a fraction of the original infrastrcture cost that you may have to invest otherwise.
So, how does this sound to you? cool!! - wait a minute! let us propose this idea to some people in IT.
Interview with Developer
Developer: Sounds cool! Do I need to learn new language or something?
Answer: No. You may still use your favourite technology.
Developer: Ok, then host it wherever you like.
Interview with IT Project Manager
Manager: Looks good. At-least I can sleep in the night I guess!
Interview with Security
Security: Sounds shocking!! - Are you telling me that you will host the data outside the organization network.
Answer: Yes
Security: How can you assure my data is secure out there?
Answer: You can use the organization standard encryption mechanism to protect your data.
Security: Is it possible that administrators in your department can see my data?
Answer: Yes. Handful of administrators can see the data.
Security: That is scary!. Where exactly are you going to store my data. I have legal issues to keep organization data outside my country.
Answer: We can manage that.
Security: How exactly you will store my data? How many physical servers?
Answer: We may not reveal that information. This is our business.
Security: Ok, can you share the security architecture of your infrastrcture where you are going to keep the data and application.
Answer: No. We are not interested in revealing our business secret and security information to anybody else.
Security: Who are the other businesses sharing the "cloud" space with us?
Answer: Sorry, we can't reveal that.
Security: Well, If you are not transparent on your infrastructure security then I am not comfortable at all.
Interview with CIO
CIO: Can you host my existing applications to the cloud and reduce my IT cost?
Answer: Yes
CIO: Ok, so does that mean that I have to dump all my existing infrastrcture and move to the cloud?
Answer: Yes. You may do incremental steps to move to the clouds.
CIO: Well, I have already done huge investment on IT, keeping a very long strategy in mind. So what am I going to do with that?
Answer: You may still keep your middlewares, ERP and other systems and can scrap only the web and application servers.
CIO: Is it possible that, my servers can be a part of your elastic IP configuration?
Answer: What! Can you explain?
CIO: The application stay in my existing application servers, but whenever new servers are needed then I would use your additional cloud servers and you can scale down it whenver demands are low.
Answer: No way! we can't do that.
To be continued...
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