Cloud Computing is the buzzword that is being circulating these days. Different people, vendors and companies define what is Cloud computing differently as it sees it fits to their needs.

Speaking to large Enterprise Customers and looking at each vendor marketing collaterals, all of these are not as different as it sounds. It is definitely different ways to achieve the same thing.

For me; when I think about this, looking at how different the definitions and implementations could be, yet still resembles same thing “Cloud Computing”. The reason is simply illustrated in my analogy of composing a song. Songs are so different in taste, styles and qualities. Also different people defines songs to their taste and depends on how the song fits him/her.

Song requires different things to be a song. Words, instruments, …etc. are the main components that make a song. You make the final song by recording each of these tracks to the best you can and put them all together. End result can be different taste and type depends on the style and quality of each of these tracks and how good was the integration. One important thing, regardless of the different tastes of songs, is the harmony. You can have some noisy not in harmony song, and you can have a very well composed one and things sound totally in harmony.

Now, lets take this analogy and see what is really Cloud Computing?  

During my 15+ years career in IT field, I always saw the same struggle of how to map Business to IT. Business has a very dynamic nature, and IT has always been trying to respond to the Business in reactive way. A lot of consulting firms and IT analysts have been trying to put different components in the IT as “proactive” and “Dynamic” as it could be to respond to the dynamic nature of the business.

So the concept of having Dynamic IT infrastructure has been going for so many years. In my humble opinion a lot of vendors have been trying to develop and mature their products to address this pain point. You will find different frameworks and enterprise architecture, that can be too complicated sometimes, trying structure how to interact and meet the dynamic business requirements. There have been different waves and trials trying to address this in so many individual ways over and over. You can recall waves of consolidation, transformation, and modernization, EAI, to Services Oriented Architecture (SOA). The SOA is where really everyone start to recognize yes that what we want to achieve. Simply put, a methodology to provide things as services. 

The main challenges, in all the attempts to really fully have a very dynamic infrastructure, can be summarized in:

• Stack dependency. Each layer was really not so independent as vendors claimed. A lot of SOA projects failed or did not reach the promised ROI by the vendors because they only focused on addressing Applications in more re-useable format.

• Technology needed to mature. The main thing is really to decouple each layer to address the first challenge here. With the Technology at that time, Virtualization was still not yet there, and had a very tight relationship between OS & HW.

• Integration & Orchestration. After Technology matures in each of the components or layers, now how we can have the needed integration to have the “harmony” we discussed above in our analogy. We needed to build different integration and orchestrate the full IT stack. But wait, it is still challenging because of different interfaces, this gets us to the next point. 

• Standardization and Interoperability.   There is a large fight to try to make specific standards for each layer. You will see the religious fight between Open Source and other Proprietary vendors, each is trying to push its way. I think this fight will stay there for sometime till this layer mature.

All the other claims that how we secure data in the Cloud, regulation, availability, …etc all of these can be addressed with proper Architecture.  Again in my opinion the above challenges were the main show stopper.

Now as the technology is maturing where we can have these layers automated and integrated , it is all up to the need of the end-user on how to consume the tools and build his/her own cloud. Again, the song analogy, you can compose random tracks and call it a song, or you can spend the needed time and architect the proper tracks and compose/integrate a song that gives you the harmony and the needed attributes that you desire.

For the Cloud there are main components (tracks) that well define the architecture of a Cloud. But do we need to use all these? Absolutely not. You will only need to define and select the right tracks for you that build you song (Cloud). Integrate it to compose the harmony in your Cloud (Song).

In the next Blog I will talk more about building each of these layers, and categories of how each model works. Followed by another Blog showing what are the challenges (not technical) that Enterprise will face and how to overcome these within Enterprise for successful Cloud deployment.

 Copyrighted 2012 - Sherif AbdElGawad