InfoWorld launches cloud computing iGuide

As regular InfoWorld readers know, we’ve been covering cloud computing since it started to take shape three years ago — and parsing out what the industry’s biggest trend really means. Today we’re kicking it up a notch with the launch of a new InfoWorld iGuide to cloud computing.

Think of this graphical iGuide as a portal to help you assess your needs and develop a cloud computing strategy. We’ve divided the iGuide into six sections, five of them covering common public cloud activities on the open Internet and one devoted to the so-called private cloud.

[ Mouse around InfoWorld’s iGuide to cloud computing and make sense of it all. | Read Paul Venezia’s Virtualization Networking Deep Dive for an essential part of private cloud infrastructure. ]

Cloud applications. Otherwise known as software as a service, cloud apps began as the answer to a simple question: Why can’t enterprise applications be as easy to use as websites? That’s how Salesforce.com, among others, started out. But the real value to the customer is the speed of deployment and the lack of up-front licensing and server costs. Just set up user accounts, and the provider delivers the application over the Internet through the browser on a subscription or per-use basis — and ongoing upgrades are part of the bargain.

Big data. Companies collect more data than they know what to do with, from clickstream data on millions of Web users to terabytes of security and system log files. There’s gold in that data: predictive analysis for online retail, security threat assessment, early signs of system failure, and so on. But most of that data is unstructured, which means conventional SQL databases won’t do. And investing in the infrastructure required for large-scale NoSQL or MapReduce processing isn’t worth it unless you run such huge jobs all the time. So why not “rent” that infrastructure from a cloud provider?

Development and testing. You can divide dev and test services into two basic categories: the raw compute and storage providers that let you set up your own environments, and platform-as-a-service providers that offer specific, often incredibly rich, development environments. Microsoft has made a big push lately with its Windows Azure platform, while Salesforce’s Force.com platform and Google’s App Engine provide their own frameworks and tools. Those who create Web applications using a platform as a service typically deploy on that platform as well.

Disaster recovery. Virtualization and commodity cloud services vastly reduce the cost of redundancy. Before, if you wanted a hot or warm site as a backup for your production data center, you’d need to build it and maintain it as a kind of physical clone — or have a provider do it for even more money. But virtualization has changed the equation. Now you can wrap up your virtual machines, upload them to an infrastructure-as-a-service provider’s servers, and keep them continually updated for far less.

Compute and storage. Simply being able to extend data center infrastructure by going to an infrastructure-as-a-service provider’s site, entering account info, and provisioning resources can vastly increase the agility of IT operations — particularly for short-term “burst” applications. Amazon is the best-known provider, but Rackspace has been in the game nearly as long, and IBM now offers enterprise-class infrastructure-as-a-service plans.

Private cloud. What cloud service providers are doing sounds awfully attractive to enterprises. With homogenous hardware, data center automation, and effective virtualization management, one admin can run a magnitude more servers. Plus, the chargeback and self-service functions of commercial services can be applied to inside-the-firewall services — from email to business intelligence to dev and test infrastructure — improving cost allocation and reducing overhead. The “private cloud” refers to enterprise adoption of such cloud service architecture and technology.

The benefit of the private cloud is that you get all the scalability, metering, and time-to-market benefits of a public cloud service without ceding control, security, and recurring costs to a service provider. But that sort of scale tends to work with one large application or service at a time. No one expects enterprises to turn their architectures upside down and adopt cloud services across the board.

Nor, of course, does anyone expect wholesale adoption of public cloud services to replace major chunks of internal IT — at least, not right away. Recent developments, such as the limited beta release of Microsoft Office 365, indicate that the software industry is dead serious about getting into cloud services. And the cloud service providers, from NetSuite to Teradata, keep making significant inroads. On both public and private fronts, cloud computing isn’t going away. In fact, adoption seems to be accelerating faster than many had anticipated.

This article, “InfoWorld launches cloud computing iGuide,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Eric Knorr’s Modernizing IT blog and get a digest of the key stories each day in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter and on your mobile device at infoworldmobile.com.