Author Archive

Amazon Introduces Virtual Private Cloud and legitimizes Private Clouds

Amazon introduces Virtual Private Clouds (VPC) and with that stroke, completely legitimizes private clouds. The Amazon Link for the same: http://aws.amazon.com/vpc AWS blog post: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/08/introducing-amazon-virtual-private-cloud-vpc.html In a blog post, the Amazon CTO Werner Vogels rationalizes this imperative decision by pointing out the essential properties of a cloud: Eliminates Cost. The cloud changes capital expense to variable expense and lowers operating costs. [...]

Smart Metering the Internet?

When we presented our vision of a smart meter based cloud data centers at the 1st International Conference on Cloud Computing , little did we know that an MIT research investigation will validate our beliefs and vision. As we said in the paper, modern data-centers gobble up huge amounts of electricity and usage is increasing [...]

Cloud Concepts

When most people talk about “cloud computing”, they usually refer to online delivery and consumption models for business and customer services. These services include IT services like software-as-a-service (SaaS) and storage or server capacity as a “service” but also many, many “nonIT” business and consumer services which are not “computing” tasks per se.

In engineering terms, cloud computing refers to providing services on virtual machines allocated on top of a large machine pool whereas in business terms, the term means a method to address scalability and availability concerns for large scale applications. In short, cloud computing is a way of democratized distributed computing.

The Rise Of Clouds

The concept fulfills the long-held dream of computing as a utility and thus represents an inflection point in the geography of computation and IT service delivery. It tries to replace the traditional ‘desktop-as-a-platform” with “internet-as-a-platform”, which can dynamically provide always on and always available IT services to address a wide range of needs, ranging from scientific research to e-commerce, over the web.

Like all new technologies, they challenge some of our computing wisdom, change our assumptions and brings about a paradigm shift in how computing is provisioned, deployed, and metered.