The diagram shows what we agreed we mean by Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (right hand side) and the areas encompassed by the individual terms infrastructure / platform / software on the left. A better term than “software” might be “application” since the platform part is also really just software, but SaaS has already gained wide acceptance.

It is assumed that “as a service” means all services within the definition are fully integrated up to and including the respective level, thus incorporating any sub-levels. Therefore, SaaS providers could either sub-contract to a PaaS provider, or would incorporate the PaaS themselves and provide it as part of the SaaS “stack”. In turn the IaaS could be sub-contracted or incorporated. The customer would see an integrated service.

It is also worth explaining the overlap between ‘platform’ and ‘software’; that is because some advanced platforms are built on complex software solutions which go well beyond just operating systems and a bit of infrastructure software.

For example, one could consider bare operating system as the platform, with the bespoke software application incorporating its own software infrastructure elements (eg. a bespoke CRM solution). One might also consider a Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP stack as the platform in its entirety, with only the PHP code itself being the software/application layer. The key differentiator between ‘platform’ and ‘software’ is that a platform is standardised and to an extent commoditised, with the software being the bespoke / custom element. A platform would also often, but not always, be highly scalable across multiple servers.

Standardised / commoditised software (hosted application) services, as opposed to bespoke / custom deployments, would most likely be considered to be SaaS.

Virtual differences

Until this point many experienced readers might be saying, “Yes, that that is just hardware, middleware and software renamed!”. To a large extent you would be right, with one small exception being subtle differences between modern platform/middleware, but there is an important difference between the old concept of “hardware” and ours of “infrastructure”: virtualisation.

It was agreed among the G-Cloud team that the virtualisation should now be considered as part of the hardware layer since it has become such an integral method of dividing and provisioning hardware resources. It is important to note that we drew the line precisely between the virtualisation layer (ie. the hypervisor) and operating system, viewing a bare-bones virtual machine without operating system or kernel as the unit(s) of hardware.

Of course, virtualisation is not ubiquitous. Indeed for many systems including highly scalable ones upon which PaaS and SaaS stacks are built do not use any virtualisation (Google App Engine does not, for example). In such cases one would simply view the stack without the virtualisation layer with the boundary between infrastructure and platform being between the physical hardware and operating system layers.

Network

Another critique of this model could be that the “interconnecting network” appears to link directly from the software layer through to the client device. In reality, of course, all network traffic has to sink back down through the layers from the software to via the networking & firewalling layer, then on to the client device. To keep the stack looking like a stack, however (which is correct from a logical perspective), it is better to stick the client device on top rather than off to one side. In the full postulated functional of the G-Cloud logical architecture the connections are more explicitly shown in a 2D rather than linear model. Hopefully that will be in the public domain soon!

Working on the project has given me a very clear insight into what the benefits of Cloud Computing to government and business really are, and also what a government Cloud would need to look like. That was essentially what we were describing (in broad terms) in our technical architecture strategy paper, which will be published soon. Therefore, I’m updating my definition of Cloud Computing in line with that work, and also incorporating the NIST definition, which has recently become something of a de-facto standard (although I don’t entirely agree with it).

Cloud != Utility

First off I wish to be clear: Cloud Computing is not the same thing as Utility Computing (aka. Infrastructure as a Service). Nor is Cloud the same thing as Grid Computing. Both terms are well-defined and there is no need to invent a new name for these decades-old concepts (my Dad was providing Utility Computing services from his computer bureau service before I was born!):

• Grid Computing: The combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains applied to a common task.
• Utility Computing: The packaging of computing resources (computation, storage etc.) as a metered service similar to a traditional public utility.

Cloud is often confused with Platform or Software as a Service too, but they are just extensions of the Utility Computing concept, and again are nothing terribly new. I see Cloud Computing as the combination of those old concepts of utility and grid:

Cloud Computing = Grid Computing + (Utility Computing * N)
…or…
Cloud Computing is a Grid of Compute Utilities

I shall explain. The real power of the Cloud Computing concept comes about when one views it as the mass-market for Utility Computing resources, and that is what the G-Cloud programme essentially asked the technical work stream to come up with; an architecture that would allow a number of different, but standardised, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform-aaS (PaaS) and Software-aaS (SaaS) services to be make available in one central competitive market place (the App Store).

The clear desire was also for those services to be interoperable, especially at the infrastructure level. Additionally, and this is where the “Cloudiness” comes in, the desire was such that one could request computing resources to a specified service level agreement (SLA) and at a specific security impact level, and have a pre-certified range of options which could then be chosen based on price, or other factor.

That fits with what I believe most people mean when they say “host it in the Cloud” – referencing an amorphous, distributed collection of compute resource used in a way that you don’t really care where your application resides, so long as your requirements are met.

Therefore, I maintain that when we refer to “Cloud Computing” we should be talking about an open market for computing resources, created when you combine multiple interoperable compute utilities into one massive grid, hence Grid + (Utility * N).

NIST definition

I really like the new Cloud Computing definition from the US’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for the most part. They define three service models, five essential characteristics, and four deployment models. I have represented their model on a cube, as below:

A well-managed data centre is not “a Cloud”!

The only part I take issue with is their “private Cloud” concept; something being conveyed with gay abandon by technology analysts the world over unfortunately. In most usage, “private Cloud” just refers to a partitioned off chunk of infrastructure within one utility computing provider in most cases, or worse-still just a well managed data centre with a bit of virtualisation if you ask some people!

The UK government, for example, wants a private Cloud for some higher-security requirements, but that would be a pool of resources from a number of utility computing facilities (probably partitioned off super-secure areas of providers’ data centres); an open market again, albeit one with specific requirements. As it stands, the “essential characteristic” of resource pooling is at-odds with the analyst-speak concept of a private Cloud; if it is private and dedicated to one organisation, you will only be pooling the resources of one organisation.

There are very few organisations that will have a sufficiently diverse usage profile to gain additional benefit from such an approach, however there are several with similar requirements that could club together as one private community, like UK government. Also, only NIST’s “Hybrid Cloud” encapsulates the full vision of what I believe Cloud Computing is about (interoperability etc). Therefore I would change the NIST deployment models as follows:

• Private Compute Utility: An infrastructure physically dedicated to one organisation.
• Private Community Cloud: An infrastructure spanning multiple administrative domains that is physically dedicated to a specific community with shared concerns.
• Public Cloud: An infrastructure spanning multiple administrative domains that is made available to the general public / businesses, without physical partitioning of resource allocations. (There is arguably only one public Cloud – hence the phrase “host it in The Cloud”.)
• Hybrid Cloud: A combination of public public and private compute utilities in order to allow “cloud bursting” for some requirements, or to allow a private compute utility owner to sell their spare capacity into The Cloud.

It’s all Amazon’s fault; misnaming their Plastic Compute Utility

The origin of the term “Cloud” comes from the diagrams we used to draw of the Internet back in the ’90′s; typically the automatically-routed internetwork was depicted by a big fluffy cloud in the middle of a network map, and it was just accepted that it would route things sensibly between the data centre and client (or other end points). The term then gained further traction with people using phrases like, “I’ll just host it in the Cloud”, now referring to the generally available computing / hosting resources connected to the ‘net.

Then, along came Amazon with their “Elastic Compute Cloud” (EC2), applying the term to something that (when considered on its own) is really just a massive plastic compute utility. ‘Plastic’ since you have to request more or less instances (resources do not elastically shrink) – the elasticity is a function of how you write your application to interface with their API. A ‘Compute Utility’ because it is really just one very large compute grid being sold as a utility service; why apply a new term when we have a perfectly good one?

I see Cloud Computing as the result of having multiple utility computing providers at your behest, with standardised APIs to allow provisioning from competing suppliers. That is pretty much here now, although the grid middleware to allow smooth interoperability is not quite industrial-strength.

IaaS vs. PaaS vs. SaaS

One of the nicely encapsulated outputs from the G-Cloud project to-date has been an agreement on what we actually mean by infrastructure, platform and software, and how they do differ a little from the old terms hardware, middleware and application, but that can wait for my next posting (here).

I was at the preview of this tool on 30th April in Southampton Street, and it is an amazingly powerful tool. It allow you to rapidly put together a simulated version of your data centre (including characteristics of everything from power cables to server virtualisation systems to external temperature variation), and then ‘run’ it over a period of time to see the costs and power requirements.

During the demonstration in April, Liam & Zahl (the technical and business brains behind the project) used the tool to great effect, neatly and intuitively demonstrating some of the following:

• The inadequacies of DCiE/PUE as useful a metric due to variation with light work loads; you need to measure facilities power and IT power separately.
• How virtualisation drops the total cost of a datacenter by 75% or more (or you can migrate to us and save >85% of course .
• How simply changing from nameplate (typically >400W on the label on the back of a£1,000 1U server) to peak power provisioning (most modern 1U servers never use more than 150W) reduces the 4-year lifetime server cost from £8,000 to just £5,000.
• That a modular build-out is good, but to be most energy- & cost-efficient you really need a dynamic modular approach so that you can switch M&E equipment on/off with diurnal load variations.
• How data centre costs vary with geo-location! Putting it in Iceland does not save you much after all, contrary to popular belief.

The simulator itself is a pure command-line driven tool that has been released under an open source software licence (OSL V3.0), but there is a Web-based interface that is now available to DCSG members, here, although you will need to read the user guide first unless you have a brain the size of a planet.. If you are a member of the BCS but not of the DCSG, you can find out information here: bcs.dcsg.org. If you are not a member of the BCS but are British and an IT professional, then shame on you!

The beta test is likely to last until Autumn, and feedback is welcomed so that the tool can be further improved and any bugs ironed out. Also, the Carbon Trust and BCS are looking for members willing to trial the tool on a case-study basis over the next few months. If you are interested, visit the Carbon Trust data centre sub-site.

There are a number of reasons why:

1. They used Amazon as a pricing basis (see below)
2. They are only considering mega-corps (>$500m turnover), who could indeed probably run their infrastructure cheaper if they want the bother.
3. They undervalue virtualisation. We can consolidate roughly 10:1 and get CPU utilisations up well over 50% – they were saying a norm would be 18%, and 30% at best.

Lets look at the pricing in detail; the report concludes that Cloud costs more is because they have based the calculations on the only provider perceived as offering “Cloud” or Utility computing services, Amazon, are massively overcharging for their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) resources! We (Memset) end up being up to half the price for comparable amounts of compute & storage resource.

An Amazon EC2 compute unit is approx. half a modern Xeon core. One instance costs $0.11/hour = £0.07/hour = £51.07/month

A Memset virtual machine VM4000 has about the same CPU, a bit more RAM and costs £39.95/month.

This is further compounded by the fact that a basic EC2 instance is actually a lot more resource than most small apps need! Our smallest Miniserver VM is 512MB with a tiddly amount of CPU, and that is plenty for the most online apps in the SME domain (ie. the majority of apps by number). Oh, and we charge £9.95/mo for those, so their calculations will be way, way out in terms of price per instance.

An “extra large” instance is basically a quad-core machine with 15GB RAM and 1.7TB disk, and costs >£400/month. For a dedicated quad-core server with 8GB RAM and 2×1.5TB disks we would charge around £250/month.

S3 is even worse! Amazon charge $0.15/GB-month ) which is about £0.11 /GB-month. A 22TByte storage array from Memset costs £499/mo, which is £0.02 /GB-month (79% cheaper)!

When you factor all those in, we are a lot cheaper – and we do not contend the resources. Many providers contend their CPU and RAM resources, but our Xen VM’s are 100% dedicated – you get what you pay for.

McKinsey need to realise that “Cloud Computing” is just what we dedicated hosts have been doing for years but on smaller time frames. If you want a decent definition of Cloud, see the BCS Data Centre Specialist Group Web, or my original version of that definition.

Cloud/Utility computing of the likes of Amazon only makes sense for people with dynamic load profiles. If you just need to outsource a bunch of servers, then go to a normal IT host like Rackspace or Memset. We have an online case-study example / breakdown of how outsourcing can halve the IT infrastructure costs of many companies.

Kate.

PS. Update from the Information Age conference on 28th April: Sure enough, people are now referring to “Utility” computing as the answer, which is what they actually meant when they said “Cloud” anyway, but following McKinsey that has become a bad word. *sigh*

In other words, utility computing is the provision of computing resources as a utility, in the same way that the familiar utilities (electricity, water, gas) are provided; on a pay-as-you-use basis. Sometimes utility computing it is called “on-demand computing” – the terms are synonymous. In a utility computing model the following resources would be available “on tap”:

• CPU time
  • Cores
  • Clock cycles per second
  • Floating point processing vs. integer processing (MIPS vs. FLOPS)
• Data storage (RAM, disk etc)
  • Data space (bytes)
  • Maximum I/O throughput (bytes per second)
  • Maximum transactions per second (I/O operations per second)
  • Error correction level
  • Redundancy (eg. RAID level)
• Bandwidth / connectivity
  • Throughput (bytes per second)
  • Latency to specific locations
  • Network redundancy

Grid -> Utility -> Cloud

So, how does utility computing relate to grid & cloud computing? Those terms are often used in the same breath as utility computing, or the three are confused with each other. While interconnected, though, they are different concepts:

• Grid computing is a technical approach spanning an application across multiple computers within one administrative domain (one provider, not necessarily one location).
• A compute grid is a collection of computers within one administrative domain capable of hosting a distributed application.
• Grid is about infrastructure.
• Utility computing is a sales approach, treating computing resources as a utility in the way we treat the familiar utilities (water,gas,electricity etc.). A utility computing provider would sell resources on their own grid(s).
• Utility is about business relationships.
• Cloud computing means an open market for computing resources; utility computing applied to multiple grids.
• A compute cloud is a grid spanning multiple administrative domains with applications able to move between domains in response to cost and SLA requirements.
• Cloud is about scale and the computing resource market.

Is Cloud Computing already here?

Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud is actually rather mis-named, and is really just a very large utility computing facility that spans multiple data centre locations, all of which are within one administrative domain (ie. Amazon’s massive grid).

Google’s App Engine is also not “cloud computing”, but instead a somewhat constrained sort of utility computing (you can only run applications specifically coded for the app engine). Some might call it “IT as a service”, but that term is rather too vague also.

Arguably there is only really one “cloud”, which is the mass-market for utility computing resource. To state “I am going to host this in the Cloud” would mean that you are going to run your app on one (or many) of the available utility computing providers.

Globe-trotting applications (aka. ‘Follow the moon’)

The ultimate vision of cloud computing is where you do not actually know where your application is being run at any one time. You would specify your SLA (eg. uptime, latency to a certain location) requirements and certain financial limits, and then give it with those specifications to some sort of broker. The application would then be able roam between administrative domains (eg. a data centre, a collection of PCs like Seti@Home, a super computer, your neighbours’ home appliances, etc), automatically seeking out the most cost effective resources that fit within the SLA requirements.

We are far from achieving true “cloud computing” at the moment, but we do have a number of utility computing providers coming online. As business slowly learns to let go of their attachment to tin and the concept that “this application run on that box” or even “this application runs in that data centre” then we shall see a massive commoditisation of the marketplace. This in turn will most likely result in the centralisation of compute resource into a small number of very large data centres in geographically strategic locations, and will enable much “greener” computing.

Cloud is not the most efficient form of computing purely because of optimal usage of IT resources, either. In the ultimate vision of cloud, one can envisage applications roaming the planet East-West, following the night time to take advantage of cheaper electricity prices (there is a surplus of power generation at night, and it is inefficient to transport electricity long distances at present), and lower temperatures (meaning less power for cooling).

Update: But isn’t Cloud also about IT services / SaaS?

Here I am merely trying to pin down one aspect of the poorly defined mess that is “Cloud”. In this article I am specifically talking about compute & storage resources (hence ‘Cloud Computing’) and am not attempting to define our contain the other areas to which many apply the same term.

I believe that when most people talk about “Cloud” they are referring to the phenomenon of increasing centralisation and commoditisation of ICT services – “everything over the wire”.

We need more terms; what I describe here is the mass-market for utility compute resources – the “power grid” of computing, if you will. What you are talking about could be called “Cloud Services” perhaps – services run on a compute utility and themselves delivered as a utility in a standardised manner. The problem I have with that is that while compute resources are interoperable, services are generally not (my compute and storage is directly comparable/interchangeable with Amazon’s, but Kashflow.co.uk is not so easily interchangeable with Xero.com).

I am presently catching a few moments late in the evening on a train seeing as I managed to forget my Vodafone datacard and am unplugged so can’t do any real work. Certainly, I enjoy writing about various topics, and doing things you enjoy is always important. However, is this blogging thing actually of any practical use in a business context? First of all though, we should perhaps break up blogging into two categories. The vast majority of writings are social blogs – people sharing their life experiences, usually with a fairly small (20-100 people) community of online and/or “real life” friends. The principle site for that activity seems to be MySpace, especially for slightly younger age groups, while LiveJournal appears to attract a slightly more mature group of writers.

In my view blogs are the modern day soap operas; giving people a chance to peer into others’ lives on the one hand, while allowing the writer to fulfil that deep-seated desire to share personal details with the world on the other. The range of subjects is quite staggering (here are some of the terms associated with blogging. Some simply write about their day-to-day trials and tribulations (a lot of blogs are really rather depressing), while more focused examples include details of the writer’s sexual adventures, or the dreaded catbloggers – people writing about their cat, often pictured in amusing poses (why?!). I would like to be able to disdainfully sniff at this apparent mass waste of time, but I’m just as guilty and have at times been drawn into some of the online communities that grow up and have ultimately met some good friends through them. That is, perhaps, the ultimate drive behind personal / social blogging – a modern-day means of connecting with like-minded others and making new friends.

The massive human desire (need, even?) to share can of course be dangerous. There have been many examples in the news lately of incidents such people losing job interviews thanks to be a little too open in their personal blogs and forgetting that the whole world can view what they write. More serious issues around cyberstalking have also come into the spotlight, with MySpace being sued after a young girl was assualted by someone that she met on the site. Personally, I think that is daft. When I was young the mantra “don’t talk to strangers” was drummed into us, and our parents took responsibility for our protection. It is no more the job of Web hosts and community site owners to police their content and users’ activities than it is for the phone operators to scan / filter text messages or calls. To blame a Web site for a girl being dim enough to give out personal information is a dangerous step on a slippery slope.

Anyway, rants aside, back to the subject in hand; does blogging have a place in the business world? Even though I have not been doing it long, I am already seeing benefits. On the one hand, it appears to have helped people see that there is a real person behind Memset, and that human aspect seems to be popular in what can be a rather impersonal online business world. I also like it as a platform (soap box?) to voice my opinions on a number of topics, and the very act of doing so is something I find very useful since it gives me a chance to sit back and look at the world through a different lens and to get some feedback and debate from my eclectic group of readers. Also, it seems there is demand for people willing to give their views; partly as a result of this blog I have been invited to give a few talks and recently wrote an article for a leading IT business magazine (I’ll post it here once they have published it).

So, in short, yes I do think blogging is useful for me in a business context, however there is also a misconception around it. While this blog does divert some traffic to the Memset Web site, it is pretty small in the grander scheme of things, and generating traffic is definitely not a significant benefit. That could change, I suppose, but I would encourage those writing “business blogs” in the hope that it will improve their main site’s traffic to re-evaluate their motives.

Finally, it is worth mentioning an impressive example of the power of the blogosphere. Many scientists write blogs of their activities in lieu of formal peer-reviewed publications. Last December, John Conway mentioned in his blog that he thought he might have glimpsed a sign of one of the most elusive things in modern physics; the Higgs Boson (the theoretical particle that gives everything in the universe mass). He mentioned it in his blog, but dismissed it as an abberation, however two months later another group noticed something similar and they too made a passing mention in their blog. Independently both results might be dismissed, but together the coincidence is striking and might never have been noticed otherwise (read more at New Scientist).

Blogging could be argued to be a vast waste of time, but in my view it is certainly better than watching TV, gives people an important creative & social outlet, and can have serious benefits for business and professionals. Communication is almost always a good thing – we just need to develop new mental tools to ensure that it does not absorb all our time, and employ a bit more common sense when interacting en-masse with strangers.

Online gaming is becoming serious business, with exponential growth during the last 8 years to over 12 million players (chart courtsey of MMOGChart.com) and global revenues measured in billions of dollars. That demographic of users is not just teenage boys hiding their acne from an unforgiving world, either; more and more girls are playing for example, and more adults too with the average player age in many games being mid-to-late twenties.

Take me for instance; I first got properly hooked on a MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) called City of Heroes when I was 26. While the appeal for many was running around a virtual city and clobbering villains into insensibility with a range of super-powers, I was drawn in by things like the social interaction (such games are very chat-room like), the ability to conjure up almost any costume imaginable (think 101 varieties of pink Spandex!), and trying to get my avatar to pull off nifty dance moves in the midst of some mighty battle of Good vs. Evil – I liked to let my trusty team mates do the actual dirty work!

Back then, admittedly, girl-gamers were still in a minority (perhaps 10-20% at most), but game designers are becoming ever more inventive at broadening their audience, and there is some solid research around it now too. According to an article I recently read in New Scientist, men and women have just as much fun engaging in virtual violence (for example), but women need more of a reason; a story line to follow. But then, we all know that men are more simpler creatures quite happy to take pleasure from blowing stuff up for no good reason.

So are we all going to be playing online games in years to come? No, I don’t think so, however I do think that the lines between games and social activities will become ever more blurred. Take Second Life; like most MMORPG it is a virtual world where text-based chatting is enhanced by a personally customised avatar that can laugh, cry, dance, gesticulate and more, yet it is not really a game. Unlike the traditional MMORPGs, it has no specific objective – no target for participants to achieve. It is just an online environment where people can, if they wish, build a literal second life. In 2002 EverQuest became the first MMORPG to have a significant “economy” – arguably comparable in size to Russia’s. Second Life has a real-world currency exchange actually built in, which is so effective that some players have given up their “real world” job and instead earn in-game currency.

Regardless of their ever-changing nature, it seems clear that demand for online games and virtual worlds will continue to grow, and that means more demand for servers and bandwidth. So then guys, pick up your rocket-launchers and, er, get back to work!

What is so great about a horribly expensive box that is has no more reliable hardware than, say, a £1,000 Sun Fire X2100 doubled up with an auto-failover twin for extra peace of mind. We can achieve the same functionality as the software a Cisco box runs with an enterprise-standard open source solution such as ShoreWall, so why pay the premium? In fact, because we can get in under the skin, we can heavily customise the latter to give our clients more features and it means we can save them a lot of money by avoiding having to give every one of our Packet Patrol managed firewall customers their own hardware firewall. We are certainly not in the business of selling our clients stuff they don’t need!

The same applies to things like storage servers. There are some fabulously expensive system for mass data storage often costing in excess of £20,000. Or, you can do as we do with our storage solutions and take a simple, solid, reliable machine such as DNUK’s TeraServe R420, which filled up with 10 750Gbyte disks will give you a whopping 6 TeraBytes of storage for only £2,500. If you need more than that, well, you could perhaps buy two?

There are plenty more examples. SCSI vs. SATA – Western Digital Raptor SATA drives are just as fast, just as reliable, and just as tested as the old & much-vaunted SCSI drives, so why pay more for older, less compatible technology? Blade servers vs. a pile of cheaper Dell or Sun 1U rack mounted servers – are you really that short on space, and if you fill a rack with blades are you really going to be able to get 8-10KWatts in, let alone cool it? Lets not even think about the 2 tonnes per square metre loading you are putting on the floor. Why spend the extra on something that, basically, just sounds “cooler”?

There are enormous savings to be made without compromising quality in the slightest by using a little bit of common sense and a little bit of know-how. Sometimes, yes, the horribly expensive solution is the right answer – but only at the very highest end, and it always saddens me when I hear of companies spending an order of magnitude too much one some IT solution or other, just because they have heard the name or think it is the “accepted practice”. I am afraid that there are lots of hardware and IT service providers quite happy to take advantage of unwary businesses’ lack of technical know-how.

I am certainly not suggesting that those businesses should need the know-how either (that’s our job!); I just think that ICT suppliers should be a little more morally upstanding, and educate their clients rather than fleecing them.