Thursday 29 July 2010
Whether he’s at home, at work, at the lake or at his in-laws, whenever Tommy Vallier needs to send an invoice to clients, he just goes to the nearest computer. It doesn’t matter which computer, because no one hard drive stores his files. It’s all in the cloud. On the Internet. Forget Microsoft Office, Vallier, a freelance Web developer in Kingston, writes and saves his documents on Google Docs. I now use the Web to manage my email, calendar, contacts, to- do lists, quick notes to myself, news, podcasts, photos, videos and documents,” he said. “It’s all about access.
Hence the great promise of cloud computing, the idea of putting all computing needs on the Internet rather than a local machine. All your data and applications are accessible from anywhere, at any time. No need to invest in expensive servers without knowing if you’ll use them to capacity. No need for multiple systems administrators in the IT back office. With cloud computing, you let someone else worry about the hardware and software and pay them only for what you use. This has been the mantra of major cloud computing vendors scrambling for customers, companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, and myriad smaller providers.
On the consumer side, Microsoft and Telus will soon let Canadians store their medical records online to share with doctors. There’s no shortage of analogies for cloud computing. It has been described as taking a taxi rather than buying a car. Or using the postal service instead of having a private delivery truck. In his book The Big Switch, journalist Nicholas Carr compared it to the rise of the electricity grid, when factories stopped buying and running their own power generators and paid utilities. One can also prototype ideas and applications on the Web with a limited number of test users, creating a low-cost virtual test lab. Files on office computers and mobile gadgets are automatically synchronized.
The case I have heard very recently about how the cloud can improve application development goes something like this. Developers have a need to spin up complex environments for development and the cloud makes it easy to do that. In addition, the cloud makes it easy to provision test environments. First of all, most developers are working on their own computer. For example, Java developers will have an IDE like Eclipse that is integrated with a Web Server, possibly a local database, and perhaps a connection or two to some outside “development” databases. As developers write code, they are constantly testing.
Write a few lines. test. Write a few more lines. Test. Debug. Write a few more lines. Check in the code. Come back tomorrow. Every developer knows this develop-test cycle. They do it constantly throughout the day. What developers could use is a Personal Cloud that would allow them to configure their local environment in multiple way and take it with them wherever they go. I know this sounds like virtualization and it is to some extent, but extend PC virtualization with cloud concepts and you get the Personal Cloud. Because developers who write code are also constantly testing that code as they work, the best case is to keep the dev environment local and use application lifecycle management(ALM) tools for collaboration. That is just more efficient. Every few days or perhaps every couple of weeks, a couple or JAR files or perhaps and EAR file will be deployed to a test or UAT machine that is configured for testing by QA or end-users.
Today, the computer giant is launching a new service at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Called Sametime 3D, this virtual world is mundane and workaday on purpose. Instead of exotic islands and futuristic nightclubs, IBM’s digital universe features conference tables, a gigantic appointment calendar, and a flip chart. At least one of the avatars, the computer-created characters that stand in for real people using the service, is wearing a tie. This unlikely business product is one of three new projects from the Boston-area IBM Lotus team, all designed to offer the appeal of the latest personal software ideas in office applications.
Besides the virtual world, the group’s products include Twitter-like “micro-blogging’’ as part of a Facebook-style social networking application, and a service that enables “cloud computing’’ - using remote computers connected by the Internet to do work that has traditionally been performed on a local machine. Sametime 3D enables users of Lotus’s instant-messaging client, Sametime, to set up and use virtual meeting spaces, select colleagues from their Lotus Sametime contact list, and invite them to take part in a virtual meeting. LotusLive Connections, which will be available next week, brings some trendy cloud-computing features to Lotus users, allowing them to share documents and data that are hosted “in the cloud’’ - meaning, on easily accessible Web servers. IBM’s Lotus is not alone in adding Web 2.0 features. Microsoft’s SharePoint product, which competes with Lotus, does not have virtual places or micro-blogging, but it has incorporated Web 2.0 features like blogs, wikis, and Facebook -style networking.
