Cloud Computing - A Design For Scalability?( Part1)

I have been hearing it for sometime in background, have noticed it being bandied about more frequently on my company's technical forums and have seen it appearing more regularly in my rss reader. The next buzzword , cloud computing. After spending few years in IT, I have become cicrumspect to buzzwords and hype that is generated around them and my own experience has been that doing IT is more simpler than it is actually made out to be. Anyway, yesterday I managed to pull myself to hear a talk on Cloud Computing and few slides later I got interested.

Just like in case of SOA, it will be futile to try to give an exact defintion of Cloud Computing. There are many depending upon what source you refer. Is Clound Coputing same as Grid and utlity computing or are there differences! Without going into it at this stage, the inference I could draw form my inital understanding of Cloud Computing is that - what SOA is to design of software, Cloud Computing is to deployment of software. SOA changes the way you look at application portfolio within an enterprise and Cloud Computing changes the way you look at utilising computing resources for deploying your applications. In fact SOA in hand with Cloud Computing takes Distributed computing to next evolutionaly stage. It is an evolution from distributed object paradigm (like CORBA, J2EE) to Distributed service paradigm. The abstraction is raised to a higher level. What clusters were for distributed object systems, Clouds could be for distributed service systems. It is a natural progression of good old distributed computing. In IT system architectures there always have been two main objectives:

1. Design For reuse
2. Design for Scalability

If design for reuse is more of software related concern, design for scalability is hardware related. Systems can only be truly scaled up by using more computing resource of CPU and memory. If SOA takes "design for reuse" to a higher level (even beyond enterprise boundaries at time), Cloud Computing takes "design for scalability" to next step. In a cloud you can achieve more scalability and more efficiently by transparently adding more computing capacity. And here when I say cloud computing I don't merely mean Amazon cloud or some other cloud implementations, but even clouds which enterprises can create behind thier own firewalls by using virtualisation. SOA makes us think outisde of siloed application and Cloud Computing does it for managing hardware resources. Instead of deploying various applications with differing usages in many different server in a datacenter, what if we could create , well ,...a cloud of these hardware resources and servers and have whole lot of applications deployed in cloud so that hardware is optimally utilised! And with Cloud Computing providers there would be another option of actually hiring out the hardware needs instead of buying your own capacity.

I think SOA with Cloud Computing and Virtualisation are what could be called disruptive technologies of future. Ok, you can ignore the "disruptive part". Just like SOA, Cloud Computing also has more business aspects to it and not mere technical aspects. In coming days, I will be more tuned to cloud computing and may be play with Amazon cloud and write about my experience with it.