Cloud Computing

Companies can have private clouds if they can provide elasticity, accountability and economies of scale. The challenge is not technical as much as it is financial. Companies can choose to invest in large scale infrastructure deployments to create an infinitely elastic environment - but wait before you do that, what is the cost of doing that? Servers are getting cheapers, hard disks are getting cheaper too, but to deliver a robust compute environment infrastructure one can't ignore the performance and availability attributes. There is where the cost of $ / CPU gets multiplied and $ / GBytes plays a smaller role than $ / IOPS (in a strict infrastructure sense). NetApp, EMC, IBM XIV, 3PAR, HP, provide great solutions for cloud computing, and I would recommending checking their offerings. VMWare has definitely given the organizations the capabilities to think about private clouds. I developed the roadmap for taking a compute infrastructure to private cloud (Infrastructure as a service) in 12 months (post a comment if interested).

Infrastructure is but just one component of the architecture, to implement an application in the cloud, all architecture layers have to be in congruence, starting from enterprise layer all the way to the infrastructure layer. The supporting services need to glue the stack. Risk, compliance, data migration need to be addressed as well. The good (or bad for some) thing is that these issues are addressable at technically, 2010 has seen several technologies that are addressing these quite cheaply also.

The application development groups should adopt practices that would enable applications for the cloud using SOA architecture, office productivity applications like email are easy to move to the cloud (gmail anyone? per seat cost for gmail is way too affordable to pass up). Windows live and google docs, are great examples where companies can move several functions to the cloud, diverting resources to other higher value add tasks.