Cloud Computing - Two Things to Move to it Today

By Shivesh Vishwanathan

Cloud Computing is becoming a mainstream technology with almost all major industry heavyweights backing it. As details emerge and the platforms and technologies are refined, many software vendors are evaluating the move to cloud. Being a fairly new and emerging technology, there is a need to evaluate the value of migration to cloud at minimal cost.

[caption id="attachment_55" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Cloud Computing - Two Things to Move to it Today"][/caption]

 In this article, we will look at two pieces of software that a vendor can move to the cloud without a negative impact, and in fact benefiting from inherent strengths of the cloud platforms. These are meaningful and progressive steps towards the cloud that have a very good chance of being in the mainstream cloud when the air clears around it.

Identify your Whole Product pieces and move them to a cloud-enabled data center

Every product has bells and whistles that create a complete experience for the users. In product management parlance, this is called the Whole Product or Augmented Product, as opposed to just the software. Following are some examples of whole product:

1. All the rich content around a trip planning website such as city guides, attractions and images


2. User Generated Content (UGC): The traditional definition of Whole Product included only the stuff that product managers and companies included to complement the user experience of their product. For example, the iTunes Store completed the iPod user experience. In the Web 2.0 realm, user generated content is one such item. Moving out the augmented product pieces to the cloud is a smart idea for two reasons. Firstly, it is usually safe to say that the augmented pieces are an essential, but non-core part of your product that you would want to manage easily and efficiently without losing your focus on the core. Secondly, UGC and other content are a big part of user experience these days, and are inherently very elastic and unpredictable in growth. Cloud computing will enable you to manage and scale them very effectively.

Move data with complex structural requirements to the cloud

Traditional way of looking at data has been in a relational model or maybe a hierarchical model. Any other complex view of data was modeled in these forms and the resulting performance hit was handled by de-normalization and other techniques. However, with the explosion of data that we have seen in the last few years, these models seem to be breaking at the seams.

So, the erstwhile taxonomy of entity, relationships, joins etc. is being fast replaced by priorities like replication, redundancy, partitioning and folksonomy. As you can imagine, these requirements actually end up requiring a whole lot of computing power and scalability. Enter cloud computing. All cloud computing platforms sport multiple data modeling architectures. Amazon uses SimpleDB, Google has BigTable and Microsoft has SQL Data Services, which supports Queue, (Non-relational) Tables and Blobs. Any part of your application that you think has been force-fitted into an RDBMS structure is best moved to this newer paradigm of data management. Some examples of such complex information are:

1. Tagging: When I first started using GMail, I was blown away by their email "Labeling" feature. Labels allow you to "tag" your email by different names. Labeling is clearly superior to using folders, since if you tag an email as Work, Project and Web 2.0, you have not one, but three different ways of reaching the email. So, few years of GMail use later, I struggle today with the idea of having "folders" in my email client. Tagging or labeling of information is just not practically suited for RDBMS or hierarchical databases. So, if you have or plan to use tagging or folksonomy in your product, you would do well to move it to the cloud.


2. Data-centric applications that have multiple interconnections between nodes: This is quite self-explanatory, but there are many data intensive applications out there that can benefit from a rethink in the way their data is modeled. This harks back to the force-fitting I alluded to earlier, and you would be clearly making the right move by moving it to the cloud.

Seen from the perspective of data modeling then, cloud computing becomes a piece of an extremely important puzzle. You need scalability in using some of these newer data models, and cloud computing is your best bet to be able to do that properly.

Shivesh Vishwanathan
Harbinger Systems - Your partner in technology innovation

Harbinger Systems is a leading provider of software engineering services to some of the world's best product companies. By leveraging cutting-edge technologies, Harbinger Systems works with its customers as a partner in technology innovation. To learn more or set up a discussion with us, visit us at http://www.harbinger-systems.com or contact us at http://www.harbinger-systems.com/company/contact-us.htm

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Shivesh_Vishwanathan
http://EzineArticles.com/?Cloud-Computing---Two-Things-to-Move-to-it-Today&id=3173371

What is Cloud Computing and Cloud Software

Author: Ted Brumby

There was a time, in the distant past, when data and software had to be stored and processed on or near the computer of the person using it. Of course 'the distant past' in the computer world could refer to the previous twelve months. In this case, it means up until the late 1990s, when 'cloud computing,' both as a concept and as a practicality, began to become a reality.

[caption id="attachment_8" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="The Cloud Computing Australia"][/caption]

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has a technical definition: 'Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction'.

In other words, cloud computing is the on-demand provision of computational resources such as data and software through a computer network instead of from a local computer. Users perform a task to without having the required software or hardware on-hand. The user's computer may only contain a basic operating system and/or web browser that simply serves as a display terminal which has been connected to the Internet.

Cloud computing is an extension of LANs, or local area networks, which allowed several storage devices or CPUs to be organized to increase the performance of the entire system. Cloud computing allows a functional separation between the software and hardware used, usually outside the LAN, and the user's computer. This location is often in a remote datacentre of some kind, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

Practically, this means that any user, as long as they have an Internet connection, can store and access files such as bookmarks, pictures, music, and videos. The user no longer has to carry a DVD or thumb drive to perform word processing tasks and even play games, but can accomplish these tasks on a remote server. Today, even email can be used with cloud software, whether it's web-based, company owned, or a client program.

Why the use of the term 'cloud'? It's a metaphor for the Internet, based on how the telephone network used to be represented, and later to depict the Internet in computer network diagrams which depicted its underlying infrastructure. In cloud computing, details are removed from users, meaning that they don't need to have expertise, or even control over, the technology infrastructure as long as they're in the 'cloud' that supports the technology they\'re using.

Cloud application services, also called Software as a Service, or SaaS, deliver software as a service over the Internet. This eliminates the need to install and run the application on a user's computer, which simplifies maintenance and support.

A good analogy of cloud computing is most people's use of electricity. For most of us, all we have to do is flip a switch to use it. We don't have to control or even understand the technology behind it. As a matter of fact, most of the technology we use every day can be understood in this way.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/software-articles/what-is-cloud-computing-and-cloud-software-4833186.html

About the Author

Ted Brumby has been running a small business for a while and so he guarantees that technological devices such as cloud software or crm tools are vital implements for all businesses. According to Ted, cloud computing means mobility and speed in daily procedures, supporting and generating good quality of work for all staff.