Saturday, November 14, 2009

Pay per second for mobile calls - inspired from cloud model ???

When I was watching television these days i noticed few adds from various indian telecom service providers regarding pay per second billing scheme.. Initially a new service provider came up with the Pay for second model billing and consequently all others tend to follow to provide the same in order to catch up the competion, ok understand you are thinking why I am talking about this here now, right....
I was able to corelate this model of billing similar to cloud model, so i thought to put my thoughts here so that you can better clarity on the cloud model...
Before this 'Pay per second' model , for the mobile providers the unit of billing was say for 30 seconds , so if you take a call and complete the call in 1 second you have to pay for the whole unit of 30 seconds, the question arised why I have to pay for the remaining 29 seconds which I haven't used ??
Similarly i can compare it here with the cloud model of billing earlier applications hosted on servers will have the resources in the server reserved whether the resources have been utilized or not , resources might have been utilized effectively only during peak load period , during the remaining periods it might have been under utilized ... now with the cloud model you will be paying only for the resources you have utilized and that too for that specified period only...
Whether these service providers got inspired by the cloud model ???? :)

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Why Cloud the buzz word now...

In my previous post I gave some introduction to cloud computing, now i can brief why Cloud is the buzz word of the technology today. From a invester prespective one of the biggest benefit that cloud computing provides is that it reduces the Capital Expense (CapEx) .

I can explain it more clearly with an example suppose you had some innovative idea to develop some e-business application. You feel so confident about the application and your business analysis say that the application has to be support accessibility by around 1000 users simultaneous. You have developed the application and now you have to make it ready for 1000 simultaneous users.

What can you do now... do some performance tuning to make the application ready, Make some capacity planning for 1000 users , procure hardware to serve that many number of users, invest huge amount to procure the hardware, ok you have done everything and the application is hosted.. What if the application didn't reach well as you expected or what if the application is used by only 100 users and not 1000 as you predicted ? The hugee money you have invested into the hardware is not utilized and you are not making money as you predicted...

I can provide you a simple solution for this, once you have the application ready you can host the application in a environment which takes care of backing up the application , manage failover, takes care of scaling based on demand if all these can be done at a cost of less than 10 Indian Rs (.12 cents USD) per hour what do you do ? Yes the answer is cloud, currently public cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, Google are providing cloud environment with the cost as I have mentioned. See how much of investment risk has been reduced , how much of capital expense has been reduced.

Also if the application is a hit and you want to scale the application you do it with a mear change in configuration file. You pay for what you use in the cloud. What else you want.. gotcha why cloud is so buzz now..

Saturday, November 7, 2009

What is cloud computing ?

Cloud computing is a methodology by which resources are consumed dynamically on demand over internet where the resources can be storage, memory, core and extend to infrastructure, platform , application.

Think of the change we had when web technologies able to migrate from static to dynamic contents, i can compare this to such a revolution where as cloud computing provides ability to consume resources dynamically.

No wonder Gartner has predicted 'Cloud Computing' as top strategic technology that most organizations will drive for during the year 2010 http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1210613

Few factors that drive cloud computing

1. Effective utilization of resources
2. Capacity on demand
3. Pay as you use model
4. Green IT
5. Reduce expense on hardware