Cloudy or clear?

Having just moved into Sun's Cloud computing organisation, I was interested by a British Computer Society (BCS) meeting on Cloud and Green computing from Kate Craig-Wood, MD of UK hosting provider Memset and member of BCS Data Centre SIG committee.

She outlined the diffentiators between Cloud / Grid / managed hosting:

• cost scaling: utility/cloud generally has linear scaling of price, no tiered pricing, hosting has lots of tiered pricing
• time to scale: adding more compute / storage - minutes for cloud (automated), hours for hosting (manual)
• choice: cloud has restricted choices, managed hosting has wider choices
• resiliance: hidden advantage of cloud versus hosted VMs
• SAAS: pricing per seat easier on a cloud as costs scale up linearly

How does cloud compare to utility computing and managed hosting? Kate suggested there will be a blurring of the boundaries - managed hosting on VMs becomes much more like cloud, through simplification of choice, reducing time to provision / scale, more granular billing, etc.

Intangibles, like security and resiliance, affect the perceived value to users, so visible price is not the only decision criteria.

Computing is not yet a utility - need ability to compare prices, and standard metrcis haven't evolved. For true 'cloud computing', we need open, standard APIs and the ability to move applications between cloud hosts.

My key takeaways for cloud providers:

• Keep entry costs low - need a low barrier to entry
• Need for open standards to allow portability of apps between cloud providers
• A need to use tiered pricing to match economies of scale achieved by managed hosting
• Cloud advantages: ability to scale rapidly (up or down), with costs following scale - billing per hour (or minute?), so very suitable for unpredictable, variable loads.
• Several unresolved issues, like sw licencing for applications running in the cloud, ownership and access to data and compliance with data privacy requirements (where is the data?)
• New opportunities: broker for cloud offerings - reselling computing - moving apps to low cost providers

Coincidentally, today I learn that Amazon are changing the billing model for EC2 to get closer to a managed hosted virtual machine with some significant cost savings compared to pure 'on-demand' pricing: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10194598-92.html

Find out more about Sun's Cloud computing approach at CommunityOne East
March 18 - 19

You can attend the CommunityOne East web event without registration by visiting http:/www.sun.com/communityone on March 18, 2009. And if you can't make it to the web event that day, we'll be recording and posting the sessions to the site for on-demand replay.