Cloud Computing 101, p2

Continuing my part-1 post about cloud computing basics, this second post should continue to define different types of "clouds" as well as what you gain and loose by using them

If you look at a cloud solution, it's really a bunch of software layers stacked on top of each other. You have the hardware (servers, disks, switches, routers), you have bare metal operating systems, hypervisors, virtual servers and inside those you have programming languages (python, java, php), development frameworks, database servers, and your own business logic code living on top! Clouds are categorized as either IaaS, PaaS or SaaS. The type of cloud is basically defined by which layers of the stack the cloud abstracts away from you, and which layers you "own" and control. Another categorization scheme is private, public and hybrid clouds. Let's take a quick tour on what each of those cloud types mean

IaaS is Infrastructure as a Service. The cloud abstracts away as little as possible from you. Basically the cloud provides you with virtual servers, networking and storage and that's it. You use those building blocks, just as you would use them in any physical datacenter to build your own compute infrastructure. The only difference is that you don't worry about how the servers are powered, cooled, what brand of disk or SAN is used ..etc. All you care about is your provider's SLA as mentioned in part-1. Other than that, it's business as usual

PaaS is Platform as a Service. The cloud is abstracting away the infrastructure and some more. The cloud in this case is no longer composed of virtual servers and disks, it is however a "development framework". When you write code, you are coding against the platform, against the cloud itself. A PaaS cloud, assuming you're creating a web application, would tell you how to route requests to your handlers, how to write code to handle specific requests, would provide an API for storage, would perhaps provide an API for database (SQL, or noSQL doesn't matter here). Your application code is written against the API of the cloud. As such, you have no idea about "low level" details such as networking, IP addresses, failed servers or even the number of virtual servers running your code! So essentially you upload your code archive and it just runs on the cloud, no questions asked

SaaS is Software as a Service. In this case, you're only using software running on the cloud that someone else had written. If you've used facebook, Gmail, linkedin, Google docs, SalesForce ...etc that's it. In essence the service you're getting is the actual final "application" you need. This is the highest level of abstraction. You do not concern yourself with infrastructure, nor with code to build an application with. You pay to use the application itself and the SLAs you get are for the application availability and your data availability

What type of cloud suits you best, is a question that needs some thought and that depends on one's set of requirements. IaaS clouds provide the least abstraction and the most control! They are a good first step to migrating off-the-shelf software to the cloud and benefiting from cheap, on-demand, elastic infrastructure. Since they provide the least abstraction, if you'd like a scalable infrastructure, you would have to do all the work yourself. It is generally not so painful to migrate from an IaaS cloud to another. PaaS clouds however, since they provide higher levels of abstraction, are much easier to manage and scale. It essentially auto-scales delivering cloud computing holy grail. However the big price is that you generally have to rewrite your application to the particular cloud platform. Not only is that painful, but it also may lock you in to the cloud vendor making it extremely hard to change vendors afterwards. Which is why I think the open-source world needs great open-source PaaS cloud frameworks (Have a favorite? drop me a line in the comments section). If a SaaS application meets your needs at a good price point, then the only potential disadvantage would be data lock-in, as well as the (in)ability to mashup the SaaS application with other tools. A good piece of advice here is to choose SaaS applications that provide full API access to your data such that you can easily pull off all data and meta-data should you need to.

A different categorization of clouds is private vs public. Private simply means that the cloud infrastructure is built in-house behind the firewall. For example you could turn your corporate datacenter into a private cloud. The benefits being, you gain better efficiency and datacenter utilization across different departments as well as being able to provide an elastic and fast response to your enterprise's departmental IT needs. Should you want to start playing with a private cloud solution, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud is a good start. Public clouds pertain to a cloud run by a third party service provider. A public cloud is either Iaas, PaaS or SaaS or even a mix of some. Why you would want to migrate some workloads to a public cloud, is simply because public cloud vendors due to their economies of scale are able to provide equivalent if not better service, at a significantly lower price point coupled by the ability to instantly grow. A hybrid cloud on the other hand is a private cloud that can "burst" to a public cloud when its resources are exhausted. The goal is to bring the best of both worlds, the control, data-security of private clouds with the elasticity and economies of large scale public clouds. More and more work-loads are being migrated to the cloud and it's all just starting.

Has your organization migrated some workloads to the cloud already, are you planning on that? Are you planning on building your own private cloud? Please let me know in the comments, let me know the motivations and the challenges you faced. If you have any questions in general, let me know as well