CLOUD ESSENTIALS: UNDERSTANDING THE BASICS OF CLOUD COMPUTING

 WHAT IS CLOUD COMPUTING :-

If you're unsure about what Cloud Computing is, you are probably among the 95% of people that are already using cloud services, like online banking and social networks, but don't realize it.




The "cloud" is a set of different types of hardware and software that work collectively to deliver many aspects of computing to the end-user as an online service.




Cloud Computing is the use of hardware and software to deliver a service over a network (typically the Internet). With cloud computing, users can access files and use applications from any device that can access the Internet.



An example of a Cloud Computing provider is Google's Gmail. Gmail users can access files and applications hosted by Google via the internet from any device

WHAT IS PRIVATE AND PUBLIC CLOUDS:-

A Public Cloud is based on the standard cloud computing framework which consists of files, applications, storage and services available to the public via the internet. Gmail is an example of a Public Cloud.




A Private Cloud is comprised of files, applications, storage and services that are implemented and protected within a corporate firewall, under the control of a corporate IT department. An example of a Private Cloud would be a company that uses Microsoft Exchange because Microsoft Exchange can only be accessed by an authorized user through a secure VPN connection.

Types of cloud computing services

If this definition of the cloud sounds huge and all-encompassing, that’s because it is. There are a wide variety of possible cloud computing services. The three types most likely to be useful to consumers and 

businesses are Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service.

1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

This is the foundation, or “base layer,” of cloud computing, and includes physical infrastructure such as servers, storage disks, and facilities. Organizations benefit from pay-as-you-go, on-demand storage and web hosting, which can be easily scaled bigger or smaller as need fluctuates.

2. Platform as a Service (PaaS)

This “middle layer” of cloud computing provides the operating system from which applications run. Here, the service operator provides a programming language and web server, which allows application developers to create and run their software solutions.

3. Software as a Service (SaaS)

Finally, at the “top layer,” we find software applications specifically developed for the internet. Here, consumers generally pay a monthly or yearly fee in order to use a certain software in the cloud (as opposed to traditional software, which requires a single, up-front cost for perpetual use). Because pricing is pay-per-user, organizations can quickly add or remove users without having to accordingly scale their associated platform and infrastructure. This on-demand approach allows for rapid, efficient adjustments in staffing. Examples include Salesforce, Google Apps (Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs), and Microsoft Office 365.

IS CLOUD COMPUTING JUST A CLOUD OF 

POLLUTION ?

Environmental watchdog group Greenpeace is taking on the technology sector again. On Wednesday, the organization released a 52-page report “How Clean is Your Cloud?,” analyzing the energy policies and data center operations of some of the world’s leading technology companies, including the likes of Oracle, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, HP, Facebook, Google, and Apple. Greenpeace’s take? With some exceptions, technology companies are mostly failing to adopt clean energy practices and are still largely relying on so-called “dirty” energy sources like coal-fired power plants to fuel their power-hungry data centers. Specifically, Greenpeace has singled out Apple, branding the company as the most reliant on coal-generated power of any firm in its survey. (In an unusual move, Apple quickly refuted Greenpeace’s analysis, and Greenpeace fired right back.)

Is cloud computing really bad for the environment? What can tech firms do to minimize their impact? And what’s Greenpeace’s agenda here?

Greenpeace’s rankings

                       

                                                     

Greenpeace’s report ranks 14 technology companies on seven criteria. The first three criteria focus on energy sourcing: how much of the companies’ power Greenpeace estimates comes from coal and nuclear sources, respectively, along with an overall “Clean Power Index,” based on estimated power demands for company facilities like data centers. The “Clean Power Index” is essentially Greenpeace’s overall ranking of a company’s energy practices.

The other four rankings are letter grades (A through F) for how well Greenpeace feels the company is behaving on four key criteria:

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1. Energy transparency
2. Infrastructure siting
3. Energy efficiency and greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation
4. Renewables and advocacy

Each of these are basically Greenpeace’s assessments of how well companies are walking the walk on clean energy. Of these points, the first (energy transparency) is perhaps the most controversial, and in fact lies at the heart of Greenpeace’s current tit-for-tat with Apple. Greenpeace wants companies to reveal detailed information about their energy consumption and sourcing, both on an overall and a site-by-site basis. That would enable advocacy groups like Greenpeace (as well as regulators and consumers) to accurately evaluate the companies’ energy policies. However, most tech firms consider this information proprietary. After all, if you build a data center and than reveal how much electricity it’s using, that gives your competitors a pretty good idea of what that data center can do. That, in turn, gives them insight into how you’ll have to invest your money for future growth and long-term operations. Most companies don’t like to lift the curtain that much on their way of doing things.

Unfortunately, that means Greenpeace often has very little data to work with for its analyses, and often has to use estimates, rankings, and third-party sources to take its best guess at how companies are doing.

So how does Greenpeace think companies are doing? Would you believe Yahoo got the highest Clean Energy Index, with a rank of 56.4 percent? And that score is essentially neck-and-neck with Dell, which came in with a 56.3 percent ranking. From there, it’s a long fall to third place, with Google earning a 39.4 percent ranking, Facebook coming in with a 36.4 percent ranking, and Rackspace (a large hosting provider) coming in with a 23.6 percent rank. At the bottom end: Salesforce, with a Clean Energy Index of just 4 percent. Oracle was also in the single digitas with a 7.1 percent ranking. From there is IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft, with rankings of 12.1, 13.5, and 13.9 percent, respectively. Apple earned a 15.3 percent.

Why did Yahoo and Dell rank well?

                                

                                         

   

Greenpeace ranked Yahoo highly primarily because of the cooling designs employed in some of its data centers, and large data centers in the states of Washington and New York that can be driven by hydro power. Yahoo’s so-called “chicken coop” data center design cools servers using outside air, rather than by a more-or-less industry-standard practice of employing industrial-scale air conditioning. Even on the hottest days, outside air is usually cooler than the heated air inside servers. Typical data centers might put as much as 40 percent of their power into cooling, a cost driven up over the years by more gear running hotter in less space. Meanwhile, Yahoo says its chicken coop data center in Lockport, New York puts only about 1 percent of its power towards cooling. Yahoo legitimately deserves some applause for that.

Conversely, Greenpeace doesn’t say much about why Dell’s data center operations ranked so highly. 

The company only gets mediocre marks for transparency, siting, and efficiency. But Greenpeace touts the company’s preference for renewable energy and purchase of renewable energy certificates (RECs) — basically certification that Dell paid for the production of renewable energy, even if that energy didn’t go into Dell’s data centers. Greenpeace also ranks Dell as consuming less coal- and nuclear-generated power than any other company — although it’s not clear how much of that is due to REC purchases. It’s worth noting that Greenpeace’s analysis is only about data centers: Dell’s manufacturing operations and outsourcing weren’t considered.

Greenpeace also had praise for Facebook and Google as companies willing to publicly commit to renewable energy practices and supplies. Greenpeace seems to adore Facebook’s new data center in Lulea, Sweden (which is almost exclusively hydro-powered) along with its Open Compute project, which includes server designs and specifications designed with an eye towards energy efficiency. 

Greenpeace also lauded Google’s public commitment to energy reduction — practices that have lead Google data centers to consume as little as half the energy of a standard data center. Google also ranked highly for transparency, including publishing information on its energy procurement policies and the footprints associated with selected services.

What about Apple?

As usual, Greenpeace didn’t have very kind things to say about Apple’s data center policies, giving the company “D” rankings in everything but the infrastructure-siting category, where it earned an F. That ranking is based on Apple’s data center efforts in Maiden, North Carolina, and Prineville, Oregon: According to Greenpeace, Apple picked these locations without regard to their access to renewable energy sources, and as a result picked areas primarily served by “dirty” utilities that are 50 to 60 percent reliant on coal-based power.

                                      

                                   

Apple has responded that Greenpeace’s estimate that the North Carolina facility consumes about 100 megawatts of power is way off base: According to Apple, at full capacity the Maiden data center will draw about 20 megawatts, which Apple is mitigating by drawing from a substantial solar farm and a fuel-cell-powered facility that will eventually supply as much as 60 percent of the facility’s power. Greenpeace says, in the absence of information from Apple, it made estimates based on the size of the data center and typical industry practices — and was pretty conservative about it.

Picking on Apple’s Prineville locale also puts Greenpeace in an odd spot: the site is just down the road from Facebook’s massive Prineville data center. Last year, Greenpeace slammed Facebook for its Prineville data center, claiming that it gets nearly 63 percent of its power from coal via Pacific Power. The same is presumably true for Apple, but this year Facebook gets praise. True, Facebook gets a bit of the power for its Prineville data center from a 100 kW solar array, but a major factor in Facebook’s (and, presumably, Apple’s) decision to build in Prineville was the climate: Although summer days are hot, winters are cold and the desert climate means summer nights are cool. That means data centers can use outside air much of the year to cool servers. Low humidity means water-based “swamp coolers” are sufficient to chill air (and much of the water can be recovered) rather than industrial-scale refrigeration equipment.

PUE and CUE

                                         

Setting aside the accuracy of Greenpeace’s energy estimates, the organization does make a salient point about how the data center industry measures power consumption. The industry standard metric is Power Usage Effectiveness, or PUE. PUE is the ratio of total power consumed to the amount of power needed just to run computing equipement. An ideal data center would have a PUE of one, meaning all the power consumed by the facility is used to power its gear. In reality, a typical data center has a PUE closer to two: half the power goes to servers, switches, and gear, and the other half goes to cooling, lighting, and the popcorn machine in the employee lounge. More-efficient data centers can have PUEs from 1.6 down to even 1.1.

The PUE score is useful to companies and data center operators, but Greenpeace notes that it is essentially useless for evaluating how green a data center might be. Let’s say a large, pretty-efficient data center consumes 50 megawatts of power and has a PUE of 1.5 — but it gets half its power from coal-based sources. Just down the road, there’s a 100 megawatt data center that’s almost entirely run by hydro power — but it has a PUE of 2.0. Which is greener?

It’s easy to point to the hydro center, but PUE metrics wouldn’t illustrate it. The data center relying partly on coal power is using just half the energy of the hydro data center. Using PUE scores, the coal-reliant data center is the hands-down winner.

Greenpeace argues that Carbon Usage Effectiveness, or CUE, is a better way to evaluate the “greenness” of data centers. Developed by The Green Grid, the CUE score reflects the amount of CO₂ emissions from the data center energy consumption to the amount of energy needed to power its computing gear. Essentially, it’s the carbon footprint of the computing power in a data center. And guess what? Only one company in Greenpeace’s survey provides CUE scores for its operations, and that’s the massively distributed content distribution network Akamai. Using CUE score, the hydro data center in the example above would be the hands-down winner: After all, CO₂ from hydro power are far, far lower than coal-produced power.

However, even using a CUE score to measure “greenness” can be problematic. The hydro data center in our example above is still consuming a ton of power that it’s not using for computing; that means less power for other customers of that utility, increasing power demand and potentially making the utility purchase power from less-clean sources. Similarly, Greenpeace marks down data center operators for relying on nuclear power. Nuclear power has always been controversial, but it’s worth nothing that in terms of a CUE score, it does pretty well: Estimates vary, but CO₂ emissions from nuclear power generations are broadly comparable to onshore wind farms, and generally lower than solar power generation and even offshore wind. A CUE score doesn’t take into account the 50,000-year issue of nuclear waste.

                                     

                                              

As with several of its previous environmental assessments of tech companies, Greenpeace is picking on Apple because it is the logical media target. For years, any news surrounding Apple gets much more attention than most other technology companies. Greenpeace gets much more mileage out of its analysis if it attacks Apple than it would if it attached Salesforce — the company that actually ranked last in Greenpeace’s Clean Energy Index.

To the extent that Greenpeace promotes discussion of issues surrounding clean energy and what drives the cloud-based services so many consumers enjoy, Greenpeace’s reports benefit the greater good. However, the more easily Greenpeace’s reports can be picked apart for inconsistencies, reliance on estimates, and making judgements on the basis of few (or no) facts, the less value they have. Greenpeace runs the risk of being the environmental organization that cried (or coughed) “wolf.”

5 Examples of Cloud Computing

Having already briefly outlined what is meant by “cloud computing“, in this post I take a brief look at five examples of cloud computing in action. How many of those listed do you use?

Email on the go

Email communication now plays a central role in most of our busy lives. That’s fine if you don’t go out much but if you travel a lot, this may cause problems. Unless you carry a mobile WiFi-enabled laptop with you everywhere you go or use push email on your cellphone, having an email client sitting on your computer at home means that while out and about you risk spending time outside of the communication loop. This is one area where the cloud finds its most frequent and useful application.

Online email has been offered by all the big names (such as Microsoft, Yahoo and of course Google) for a number of years and I have tried a lot of different services. Wherever in the world I have found myself, my emails have (almost) always been made available to me. The easiest and most convenient for me is GoogleMail, although each has its pros and cons.

Of course, using webmail makes you a slave to an internet connection. The first thing you do when you find yourself in a new or unfamiliar location is to try and locate an internet café or public library to launch your secure portable browser and check your emails. Privacy concerns are never far from the surface either, especially when stories of passwords to private accounts being leaked online hit the headlines. How much of your life have you given away during email exchanges?

And then there’s the issue of possible data loss, which nicely leads onto the next incarnation of cloud computing.

No need for local data storage

Data stored on your home or business computer suffers from many of the same restrictions as email and, as with email, the cloud offers a solution. Storing your MP3′s, video, photos and documents online instead of at home gives you the freedom to access them wherever you can find the means to get online.

True, you will undoubtedly be putting your life ‘out there’ and with that comes all the security and privacy baggage that also plague webmail. Most, if not all, online storage facilities have safeguards in place to ensure that you, and only you, can get to your files – but even so. We all risk losing important files, memories and such like if we suffer from hard drive failure and storing such things away from a temperamental computer system no doubt seems like an ideal solution but where do we turn if the unthinkable happens and our chosen cloud filing cabinet suffers data loss or suddenly closes down?

Examples of online storage services include Humyo, ZumoDrive, Microsoft’s SkyDrive, S3 from Amazon, amongst others. Many offer both free and paid for storage and backup solutions.

Are you a collaborator?

On occasion you may find yourself in need of the opinion of your peers. Downloading files onto flash memory, emailing documents to friends or family or colleagues or sending submissions by snail mail is so last century. Last year Google launched a service that allowed groups of people to work on the same document, idea or proposal in real time or whenever convenient to each participant. Using Google Wave you can create a document and then invite others to comment, amend, offer opinion, or otherwise join in with the creation of the final draft.

Similar to instant messaging but offering much more scope it can take a project that might have taken weeks or even months to complete using other methods and potentially see it through to completion in mere minutes or hours. Google is not alone in producing online collaboration tools but it is the only one I have used myself. Other examples include Spicebird, Mikogo, Stixy and Vyew to name but a few.

Working in a virtual office

Yet again Google’s online suite of office applications is probably the best known but by no means the only solution on offer. Rather than having a system and space hogging suite of applications like a word processor, a spreadsheet creator and a presentation or publishing platform sitting on your computer, you could opt to work online instead. Accessibility, potential for collaboration and perhaps even online storage are just some of the benefits of satisfying your office suite needs by working online.

Examples of online suite’s on offer include Ajax13, ThinkFree and Microsoft’s Office Live.

Need extra processing power?

For the dedicated cloud enthusiast, something like Amazon’s EC2 virtual computing environment might be the answer to all your needs. Rather than purchasing servers, software, network equipment and so on, users would buy into a fully outsourced set of online services instead.

Most cloud environments on offer can customize the kind of service provided to exactly suit the needs of the user. If you need more processing power from time to time, a cloud-based infrastructure, being scalable, negates the need for up-front investment in client-owned resources.

Other service providers include the open source AbiCloud, Elastichosts and NASA’s Nebula platform.

So there you have it, five examples of computing in the cloud. When presenting these examples I have tried to balance the many advantages of working exclusively online with some of the disadvantages. Those interested in further reading are encouraged to head over to a piece listing the main advantages in XML Journal, the pros and cons on IT Governance and a detailed article on ZDNet by Cath Everett.