A Walk in the Clouds - Industry Leaders Talk About Cloud Computing and What It Means to Them
From Anita Borg Institute Wiki
Panelists: Shivani Sud (Intel), Anugeetha Kunjithapatham (Samsung Information Systems America), Kumud Srinivasan (Intel), Raejeanne Skillern (Intel)
A group of talks related to Cloud Computing ranging from an introduction of the term to enterprise deployments. Explore the current state of industry along with perspectives from leaders of various industry verticals and the actual consumers of the technology, their experiences and expectations from the technology.
Notes added by Ritu Arora. Session Location: Tucson F Panelists: Shivani Sud (Intel), Anugeetha Kunjithapatham (Samsung Information Systems America), Kumud Srinivasan (Intel), Raejeanne Skillern (Intel), Jalaja Kurubarahalli (lab126 - Amazon subsidiary)
The session started with an introduction to cloud Computing. Cloud computing is a computation paradigm that makes computation resources available as services. This kind of paradigm is dynamic and virtualized with centralized compute and storage facilities. The model is on-demand self-service one. the storage and computing resources are elastic and scalable. the pricing is consumption-based (pay-per-service). The computing power is available anytime, anywhere, internet is required to connect though.
There are two types of cloud: public cloud and private cloud. One example of a public cloud is Amazon EC2. Public clouds are provided to the end-users over the internet, and using them one can grow as much as one wants. On the other hand the private clouds are offered to a restricted group of users. There is more isolation (control) and are costlier than the public clouds.
What is required to enable clouds?
1) Ubiquitous connectivity everywhere 2) Reliability of these services is going to be important 3) Interoperability between service providers is a key to this kind of paradigm 4) Security and privacy is not of much concern here 5) Economic value are the key driving factors
Why and When not to use cloud?
1) Not a blanket approach 2) Connectivity is still spotty 3) Financial benefits are not yet been proven 4) Security is one of the biggest concerns 5) Reliability 6) The lack of interoperability so that can make one switch from one vendor to another might deter a buyer
A case-study from Intel was presented. The benefits they felt by using cloud computing were:
1) Agility to respond to the users has increased 2) Ability to accelerate the projects, especially if the expertise is not available in house 3) On-demand self-service approach goes well with the end user
However, the cost picture is not clear. If not managed correctly, it could lead an increase in cost. Security is a big concern also.
