Cloud Computing Concerns

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Everyone is hyper excited about cloud computing. The blogosphere is flooded with material, often on the good fair fairy side of cloud computing.

But as with any technology, there are cons as well as pros. There are concerns. And without a proper understanding on the concerns, neither should vendors act nor one should jump to use. For is it the understanding of these concerns that lead to solutions.

So what are the major concerns?

  • Security
    • Can we trust it? Do we have enough technology to sufficiently secure a cloud computing setup?
    • Security will always be a concern, like it is for those apps on the Web
    • However, I think we also have enough technology to achieve security
    • And as always, security is governed not only by technology, but also by human and other non technical factors, even for the cloud
    • So first and foremost, be it on the cloud or not, pay ample attention to security
  • Performance
    • Virtualization has its own challenges and criticisms on performance space
    • No matter what, software based virtualization cannot and will not reach the levels of hardware performance. Similar to the fact that hardware load balancers still has its place
    • Sometimes, elasticity and provisioning is misunderstood to boost performance. Those are not about performance
    • After all, you will be over the internet, and the moment you hit the network, you are governed by the network latencies
    • Performance might not be the problem, may be your expectations are too high; stay on premise if you want to perform
  • Availability
    • Amazon downtimes are notorious
    • Gmail outages cause havoc
    • It is a fact that availability cannot be made 99%
    • The moment a ship’s anchor hit an under sea cable, the cloud will be gone
    • You need to architect the solution to meet the realities of availability with enough redundancy
  • Regulatory requirements
    • Not everything can be put on the cloud, as the law says you got to keep your data in your home
    • It is unlikely that the regulations would change, as they have their own reasoning
    • But isn’t it the fact that any enterprise software is governed by the regulations and the potential that those will change? So it is not cloud really specific
  • Data sovereignty
    • What if the data is compromised? Who owns the data?
    • This is no different to the blogging issue. We write down our great ideas and post to that blog out there. No backup, no restore locally – but then again if you want to, you can host your own blog software.
    • If you want your data sovereignty, you should not put your data on the cloud; after all, not everything needs to be put on the cloud to leverage the benefits of the cloud
    • Go hybrid
  • Transition
    • How to take the existing apps and move them to a cloud computing setup?
    • How much of changes are required, do we want to re-architect the system? At what cost?
    • There got to be an objective ROI evaluation here, the benefits from the cloud transition should outweigh the costs of transition
    • Note that even a hybrid model would have re-architecting costs, cause tradition applications are not designed for this
    • SOA can help, thank to loose coupling

 

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