It is 2010 now. This should be the year when cloud computing starts to live up to its expectations and to the hype generated all last year. What are the obstacles cloud vendors might face and will this year really be the year of Cloud?
Virtualization has made an impact in IT and though the ROI figures have not always been too good, virtualization (the servers at least) has become rather mainstream. Why is it so? Could it be that the reason for it was the relative ease of doing a P2V migration? You know, doing the migration on VMware by using the VMware converter is quite straightforward. We have not seen a tool which would make a similar thing with for example Amazon AWS. It just isn’t easy to migrate servers in cloud environments as the application architecture will most likely need some modifications. AWS is really great for greenfield type of application deployment but hardly ready for automated migration of existing apps.
I guess the rapid success of the cloud boils down to a few things. First, there has to be a way of migrating existing applications with ease into the cloud. With AWS, this would probably mean that the life of an instance would be quaranteed, that is, there would be a similar thing as VMware vMotion (migrates virtual machines if the underlying ESX host dies) in AWS. Though, I don’t like how this would enable the building of badly deployed applications once again and make AWS consults job opportunities kinda scarce, maybe. My personal view is that you probably can first migrate the stuff by machines to IaaS providers and maybe later by applications, to for example in Microsoft Azure and then scrap the OS altogether. How I would like that!
I would not expect too much of actual savings when running the applications on IaaS provider, actually. I feel a bit sorry for saying this, though. I hope to be wrong. First of, the costs of the hardware are really nothing if it is managed by tiers of engineers during the application life time and you will need those people in cloud too. Sure, you get some possibility of elasticity, but actually, with legacy apps the elasticity is just like with VMware – vertical. I feel the real benefits of cloud are within the PaaS where the OS is abstracted out from the client. Maybe 2011 or 2012 will then be the real year of the cloud.
Tags: AWS converter, cloud converter
