In the recent concluded Amazon Web Services Summit in New York, Dr Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon provided some insight highlighting how cloud computing particularly public cloud computing will transforms future business market.
Vogels claims seven essential technology transformations will create strong foundations for enterprises to adopt cloud computing. Vogels ideas were well supported by representatives of companies using Amazon cloud services.
Distributed Architecture Simpler with Cloud
Building distributed architecture with traditional infrastructure is a cumbersome process. Maintaining a single data center provides risk to business. If the systems fail, services running on them will also fail. IT administrators use highly distributed, fault-tolerant architectures to mitigate risks using running servers and networks located in geographically isolated data centers.
With cloud, Vogels said a reliable, distributed system “becomes relatively easy.” In Amazon’s case, their data centers are backed up in multiple places each with multiple availability zones to mitigate outage and risk like natural disasters. If one system fails, your service will still be available through Amazon API.
Vogels explained Amazon offers various distributed cloud services including DynamoDB NoSQL database service, Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Simple Workflow Service (SWF), Simple Notification Service (SNS), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Queue Service (SQS).
Robust Security in Cloud
Vogels linked most data centers as a castle with a moat to protect it. Vogels said, “As the castle starts growing and growing, as happens with most enterprises, it becomes much harder to protect what’s inside the castle.”
Cloud computing as an alternative provides right security model and offers an end-to-end security guarantee for each application and keep them distinct from one another.
Amazon is investing lots of money in cloud security and it is a number one priority for them as stated by Vogels. Amazon’s application level tools help customers to protect from external cloud threats.
On Demand Scaling in Cloud
On demand scaling of on-premises database cluster and applications require more planning, more server setup and configuration, tuning, and testing. This is also costly affair and takes time to architect and to scale quickly.
Distributed systems built on cloud technologies let you scale your applications quickly and on demand. Vogels said AWS NoSQL Database Cluster approach removes latency and eliminates database-as-an-application bottlenecks, so you could build bigger and scalable database cluster.
Supercomputing is Accessible Thanks to Cloud
Supercomputers and expensive and are limited to handful of elite enterprises who use them. They are mostly used only for the highest value jobs.
By using cloud, Amazon says AWS built world’s 42nd fastest computer in the world and made it available and affordable for everyone.
Representative of Cycle Computing that uses Amazon cloud services highlights the power of supercomputing. Cycle Computing uses AWS supercomputing capacity to handle their business. The company built a 50,000 core supercomputer with AWS compute capacity to test potential cancer drugs for the pharmaceutical research firm Schrodinger. By using cloud services, the system delivered 12 years worth of calculations (to process on a single core) in three hours at an affordable cost of $4828.85 an hour.
Cloud Drives Innovation
Cloud lets you do experiments quickly and leverage the tremendous power cloud technologies. If the experiment doesn’t work, it will save you much time and money, as Vogels makes the solid point, “experiment often and fail early.”
Big Data with Big Clouds
Storing of massive volumes of data need huge data warehouse setup and are quite expensive to invest in server clusters to process the data.
But with the cloud, big data management is scalable, and organizing, analysis and visualization of data is also possible. Distributed cloud services like Amazon DynamoDB (NoSQL database), Amazon relational database service, Hadoop-based Elastic Map Reduce, Microsoft’s Azure, and offering from Google can quickly react to big data opportunities.
Mobile-Cloud Ecosystem
Building a successful mobile app is hard and may require rich media experience, multi device access, real time presence, integration with social networks, social graph based, rely on user generated content and recommendations, premium support, location aware and contain advertisements to appeal mobile users.
With a cloud mobile ecosystem, mobile apps developers can use tools like Simplegeo, Panda, Echo, Social Grid, Twilio, Animoto and others to build app quicker and easier and make them available through Amazon’s new marketplace.
Amazon CTO keynote signifies the many incredible possibilities of public cloud computing. Gartner recently identified five trends of cloud computing that is accelerating and seen as hope and challenge for many companies.
