Our panel of experts discuss cloud computing and how companies can make the best use of it. Many people reading about cloud computing in the trade journals will think it's a panacea for all their IT problems-it is not. In this CTO Roundtable discussion we hope to give practitioners useful advice on how to evaluate cloud computing for their organizations. Our focus will be on the SMB (small-to medium-size business) IT managers who are underfunded, overworked, and have lots of assets tied up in out-of-date hardware and software. To what extent can cloud computing solve their problems? With the help of five current thought leaders in this quickly evolving field, we offer some answers to that question. We explore some of the basic principles behind cloud computing and highlight some of the key issues and opportunities that arise when computing moves from inhouse to the cloud. Our sincere thanks to all who participated and to the ACM Professions Board for making this possible. WERNER VOGELS is the CTO of Amazon.com, responsible for both e-commerce operations and Web services. Prior to working for Amazon he was a research scientist at Cornell University, studying large, reliable systems. GREG BADROS is senior engineering director at Google, where he has worked for six years. Before that he was chief architect at Infospace and Go2Net. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in constraint algorithms and user experiences. GEIR RAMLETH is CIO of Bechtel, where he provides cloud services for internal company use. Prior to his current job, Ramleth started a company inside Bechtel called Genuity, which was an early ISP and hosting company. Genuity was later sold to GTE. BADROS There are two parts to it. The first is about just getting the computation cycles outside of your walled garden and being able to avoid building data centers on your premises. But there's a second aspect that is equally important. It is about the data being in the cloud and about the people living their lives up there in a way that facilitates both easy information exchange and easy data analysis. The great search tools available today are a direct result of easy access to data because the Web is already in the cloud. As more and more user data is stored in the cloud, because there is a relatively high-bandwidth connection to all those bits, there is a huge opportunity that transcends just computation being off-premises. Reilly's definition of Web 2.0 was that the value of data significantly increases when a larger community of people contribute. Greg [Badros]'s characterization complements that nicely. VOGELS It's not just data. I also believe that clouds are a platform for general computation and/or services. While telcos are moving their platforms into clouds for cost effectiveness, they also see opportunities to become a public garden platform. In this scenario, people can run services that either extend the telco's services or operate independently. If, for example, you want to build an application that has click-to-call or a new set of algorithms such as noise detection in conference calls, then you can run those services connecting to the telco's platform. The key is having execution access to a common platform. Because we have a shared platform, we can do lots of new things with data, but I believe we can do new things with services as well. We never defined the Internet, and it became extremely successful. Cloud computing is the computing side of the Internet available on a public or private basis. Let us not define it and limit its possibilities. TUCKER I see it as three layers: SaaS (software-as-a-service), which delivers applications such as Google Apps and Salesforce.com; PaaS (platform-as-a-service), which provides foundational elements for developing new applications; and IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service), which is what Amazon has led with, showing that infrastructure can also be accessed through the cloud. I believe it is in this infrastructure layer-in which we've virtualized the base components of compute and storage, delivering them over the Internet-where we have seen the fundamental breakthrough over the past two years. RAMLETH It doesn't matter who provides software services. What software-as-a-service means to me is that the guy who is actually writing the software is also running and operating it. It could be Google, Salesforce.com, or Bechtel if I have some custom applications, running inside or outside the company. VOGELS I see software-as-a-service as a precursor. Tim Chou, former president of Oracle Online, wrote a great book called Seven about different business models related to, among other things, SaaS. The title comes from seven multibillion-dollar, publicly traded companies that have been delivering software-as-a-service for decades. The book is especially interesting around the business models it explores-specifically, how business models evolve, how companies both build and provide their software, and how customers use their software. Understanding cloud computing requires a look at its precursors, such as: SaaS before it became this platform-like environment; SOA (service-oriented architecture); virtualization (not just CPU virtualization but virtualization in general); and massively scalable distributed computing. These were technologies that we needed to understand fully before cloud computing became viable. We needed to be able to provide these services at scale, in a reliable manner, in a way that only academics thought about 10 years ago. Building on this foundation, we have now turned these precursors into the commercial practice of cloud computing.
Cloud computing is not just about a technological improvement in data centers; it represents a fundamental change in how IT is provisioned and used REF .