While more and more start-ups are taking advantage of the cost-savings and agility that cloud computing provides,
enterprises are now exploring how they could leverage an external cloud, build an internal cloud or even become
a cloud provider. Because open source is fundamental to cloud computing, enterprises are also seeing that they
can avoid the old problem of getting locked in to a single vendor. Sun, a globally recognized leader in open source,
is committed to bringing the benefits of open standards and open source to cloud computing.
Cloud computing offers enormous opportunities for enterprises to cut computing costs
and speed time to market for new Web services. Whether they leverage an external
cloud, build their own cloud internally, become a cloud services provider, or choose a
blend of these options, enterprises can gain advantages that enable them to become
much more agile.
The success of massive-scale systems like Google, eBay, and Amazon led to the rise of
cloud computing — and each of these companies built their highly customized systems
on a huge scale with freely available, freely modifiable open-source software. Today, the
dominant software stacks used in cloud computing environments are also open source,
and the integrated, optimized, open-source Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python (AMP)
stack is the preferred platform for building and deploying new Web applications and
services.
Making the Case for Cloud Computing
In many ways, cloud computing is an example of the increasing movement of compute
and data resources onto the Web. But there’s a difference: cloud computing represents
a new tipping point for the value of network computing. It delivers higher efficiency,
massive scalability, and faster, easier software development. Cloud computing also
brings new levels of efficiency and economy to the delivery of IT resources on demand
— and in the process, it opens up new business models and market opportunities for
developers and enterprises.
What makes cloud computing so interesting today is that businesses are looking at
Amazon, Google, and Yahoo! and wondering why these Web companies are able to
produce such phenomenal cost savings over what an individual enterprise can achieve,
given the market pricing for basic compute and storage. The fact is that cloud computing
costs less — and it allows people to become much more agile in how they’re using IT
resources.
Cost savings.
Cloud computing cost savings are a result of increased efficiencies, which
have always been a feature of Web-scale computing. By leveraging technologies like
virtualization, companies are able to achieve a much more efficient use of computing
resources, improving infrastructure utilization rates and streamlining resource man-
agement while providing on-demand scalability. When combined with utility pricing,
this removes the need to overprovision in anticipation of future demand peaks.
And instead of funding very large capital investments, businesses are able to pay
only for the computing resources they actually need and consume, which allows
them to convert capital expenses to operating expenses.
Business agility.
The self-provisioning features of cloud computing mean much
faster time to market. There’s no need to negotiate long-term contracts. Built-in
services means someone else has already figured out how to build a scalable storage
system, so companies don’t have to do that work themselves. Cloud computing also
enables greater elasticity; if an application grows to be very large, cloud customers
only need to pay for increased resources when they’re being used. This allows for a
more flexible business model behind applications being deployed in the cloud today.
Making the Case for Cloud Computing
Cloud computing offers enterprises a way to cut costs and increase agility without
having to rework or grow internal infrastructures that weren’t designed to support
Web-based services. It enables IT organizations to increase hardware utilization rates
dramatically and scale up to massive capacities in an instant — without having to invest
in new infrastructure, train new personnel, or license new software. It also creates
opportunities to build a better breed of network services in less time, for less money.
As enterprises see how much higher their IT infrastructure costs are than those of
startups using clouds — and how much more quickly startups are able to deliver new
services — they will look for more ways to leverage cloud computing. Because cloud
computing does not involve long-term contracts (and many cloud vendors charge
customers in increments of as little as an hour), clouds are an excellent way for enter-
prises to quickly prototype new services, conduct testing and development, or run
limited-time campaigns.
For example, in a traditional IT environment, developers create applications individually
or with a team, then hand them over to an operations team or hosting provider to
stage and test — which means less control and more friction as more people become
involved. With a cloud, developers can commission servers at a low price via the Internet
and have their application up and running quickly. Clouds can enable developers to do
a lot more experimentation quickly and scale it up. And faster development and testing
cycles mean businesses can accomplish in hours what used to take days, weeks, or
even months.
Taking Advantage of Cloud Computing
So how does an enterprise take advantage of the cloud computing trend? It’s not just
about loading machine images of the business’ entire software stack onto a public
cloud; there are several different ways to exploit this infrastructure and explore the
ecosystem of new business models.
Leverage the cloud
Typically, enterprises are using public clouds for specific functions or workloads. The
public cloud is an attractive alternative for:
Development and testing.
This is perhaps the easiest cloud use case for enterprises
(not just startup developers). There’s no need to purchase servers when it’s not yet
clear if a project will pass the proof of concept.
Functional offloading.
Enterprises can use the cloud for specific workloads. For
example, SmugMug does its image thumbnailing as a batch job in the cloud.
Augmentation.
Clouds give businesses a new option for handling peak load or
anticipated spikes in demand for services. This is a very attractive option for enter-
prises, but also potentially one of the most difficult use cases. Success is dependent
on the statefulness of the application and interdependence with other data sets
that may need to be replicated and load-balanced across multiple sites.
Experimentation.
Why download demos of new software and then install, license,
and test them? In the future, software evaluation can be performed in the cloud
before licenses or support are purchased.
Build the cloud
Many large enterprises understand the economic benefits of cloud computing but
want to ensure strict enforcement of security policies. Some might experiment first
with “private” clouds, with a longer-term option of migrating mature enterprise appli-
cations to a cloud that’s able to deliver the right service levels. Others may simply want
to build private clouds to take advantage of the economics of resource pools and to
standardize their development and deployment processes.
Taking Advantage of Cloud Computing
Some enterprises will transition to cloud computing by working with cloud providers to
develop an architecture for a private cloud housed inside the corporate firewall. However,
moving data from protected areas inside the firewall to public, multitenant datacenters
can be problematic for some enterprises due to regulatory requirements. This may be
mitigated when an enterprise utilizes an external cloud that runs an environment
similar to its internal datacenter, enabling it to leverage the external cloud when
demand spikes while also protecting its data and staying in compliance.
Be the cloud
As enterprises and service providers gain experience with the cloud architecture model
and become more confident in the security and access-control technologies that are
available, many will decide to deploy externally facing cloud services. The phenomenal
growth rates of some of the public cloud offerings available today will no doubt accelerate
this momentum.
Cloud service providers can:
• Provide new routes to market for startups and Web 2.0 application developers
• Offer new value-added capabilities such as analytics
• Derive a competitive edge through enterprise-level SLAs
• Help enterprise customers develop their own clouds
An enterprise may choose to use a service provider’s cloud or build its own cloud, which
is a good option for companies dealing with data protection and service-level issues. A
third possibility is to develop a hybrid model where the enterprise owns parts of a cloud
and shares other parts, though in a controlled way. Hybrid clouds offer the promise of
on-demand, externally provisioned scale but add the complexity of determining how to
distribute applications across these different environments. While enterprises may be
attracted to the promise of a hybrid cloud, this option will likely see earliest adoption
for stateless applications that require no complex databases or data synchronization.
Any enterprise that is building large datacenters today should be thinking about whether
they will offer cloud services internally (private cloud) and to external organizations
(public cloud).
Open Source in the Cloud
Open source is the great enabler of cloud computing. From Google and Yahoo! to Amazon
and eBay, the precursors of cloud computing utilized the freely available, freely modifiable
nature of open source to build highly customized systems on a never-before-seen scale
to power their Web-based applications. It is the success of these massive-scale systems
that has led to the rise of cloud computing — which is a generalization of the same
techniques and technologies used by Google and others to enable developers the
world over to tap into a model of computing that would otherwise not be affordable
(or even available).
To the early purveyors of the massive-scale systems that inspired cloud computing, it
was the free availability and modifiability of open source that made it appealing. But
with enterprises, the attraction of open source is that it is a way to avoid the continuing
problem of single-vendor lock-in.
Open-source technologies tend to attract large and vibrant communities and ecosystems
around them, with one result being a variety of products and services tailored for
enterprise use. So if an enterprise is not happy with the service or support it is receiving
from one vendor, it can turn to a different vendor for that service and support — and if
all else fails, it has ready access to the source code and the communities that created
and maintain it.
Because open source is fundamental to cloud computing, it is not surprising that the
dominant software stacks used in cloud environments are also open source. Today, the
integrated, optimized, open-source Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python (AMP) stack is
the preferred platform for building and deploying new Web applications and services.
What’s more, cloud computing is proving to be the catalyst for the adoption of an even
newer stack of more lightweight, agile tools such as lighttpd, an open-source Web server;
Hadoop, the free Java software framework that supports data-intensive distributed
applications; and MogileFS, a file system that enables horizontal scaling of storage.
Despite open source’s central place in cloud computing, its benefits have yet to be fully
passed on to early adopters. As Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media, and others have
pointed out, open source is predicated on software licenses, which in turn are predicated
on software distribution — and in cloud computing, software is not distributed; it’s
delivered as a service over the Web. So cloud computing infrastructures — and the
modifications to the open-source technologies that enable them — tend not to be
available outside the cloud vendors’ datacenters, potentially locking their users in to
a specific infrastructure.
Although the software stacks that run on top of these cloud computing infrastructures
are predominantly open source, the APIs used to control them (such as those that enable
applications to provision new server instances) are not entirely open, further limiting
developer choice. And cloud computing platforms that offer developers higher-level
abstractions such as identity, databases, and messaging, as well as automatic scaling
capabilities (often referred to as “platform as a service”), are the most likely to lock
their customers in.
Ideally, users of cloud computing would be able to move their applications among
a variety of standardized providers that offer open interfaces to common services.
Developers and startups would be able to target public clouds, allowing them to focus
their scarce resources on the applications and services they are developing rather than
the infrastructures that power them — without limiting their ability to later migrate to
their own hosted infrastructure. Enterprises utilizing clouds for experimentation at the
departmental or workgroup level would be able to easily migrate their prototypes to a
private cloud hosted behind the company firewall or build their private clouds to expected
capacity and offload excess capacity to public clouds. Without open interfaces linking
the variety of clouds that will exist — public, private, and hybrid — these use cases
will be difficult or impossible to deliver.
Open Operating System
— Solaris, the most powerful and popular cloud operating
system, is available on Sun, Intel, IBM, HP, and Dell systems.
• Delivers the performance, stability, and security enterprise users and customers
demand
• Has more available applications than any other open OS
Open Virtualization
— From NFS to Dynamic System Domains, chip multithreading
(CMT), and Solaris Containers, Sun has the experience and expertise to take virtualiza-
tion to a new level. Sun is one of the few companies able to address all types of cloud
virtualization:
• Hypervisor (xVM Server)
• OS (Solaris Containers)
• Network (Crossbow)
• Storage (Solaris ZFS)
• Applications (GlassFish™, Java CAPS)
Open Storage
— Sun is leading the open-storage movement, combining open-source
software with industry-standard system components to reduce storage costs by up to 90%.
• Delivers breakthrough economics
• Provides massive capacities and extreme scalability without vendor lock-in
• Offers the flexibility to scale, reconfigure, or repurpose an enterprise’s infrastructure
Looking Ahead
For those developers and enterprises that want to embrace cloud computing, Sun is
developing critical technologies to deliver enterprise scale and systemic qualities to
this new paradigm:
High-density horizontal computing
— Sun is pioneering high-power density compute
node architectures and extreme-scale InfiniBand fabrics as part of our top-tier HPC
deployments. This high-density technology is being incorporated into our large-scale
cloud designs.
Data in the cloud
— More than just compute utilities, cloud computing is increasingly
about petascale data. Sun’s Open Storage products offer open-source software and
powerful hybrid data servers with unprecedented efficiency and performance for the
emerging data-intensive computing applications that will become a key part of the
cloud.
These technologies are focused on driving more efficient large-scale cloud deployments
that can provide the infrastructure for next-generation business opportunities: social
networks, algorithmic trading, continuous risk analysis, and more.
Sun is working toward a vision of offering enterprises the ability to utilize a public cloud,
build a private cloud, or use a hybrid approach by expanding research and development
efforts in four key open-source areas:
Software.
Providing the open-standards-based tools that developers and architects
need to build agile services that can be deployed in the cloud — from Sun’s Web
stack to software elements from other vendors
Systems.
Delivering compute, storage, and networking systems that interoperate
with each other and integrate with systems from other vendors, whether they’re
based on AMD, Intel®, or SPARC architectures
Microelectronics.
Pushing the envelope for chip multithreading and multicore
computing; moving to ever-higher compute densities within the cloud
Services.
Supporting development efforts through a broad range of professional
services, network services, and value-added service offerings from partners (ISVs,
OEMs, channel partners, and systems integrators)