Obstacles and Opportunities for Cloud Computing
RSS FeedBelow are the few obstacles and opportunities that at various stages directly realted to users.
Availability of a Service
Organizations worry about whether Utility Computing services will have adequate availability, and this makes some wary of Cloud Computing. Ironically, existing SaaS products have set a high standard in this regard. Google Search is effectively the dial tone of the Internet: if people went to Google for search and it wasn’t available, they would think the Internet was down. Users expect similar availability from new services, which is hard to do.
Data Lock-In
Software stacks have improved interoperability among platforms, but the APIs for Cloud Computing itself are still essentially proprietary, or at least have not been the subject of active standardization. Thus, customers cannot easily extract their data and programs from one site to run on another. Concern about the difficult of extracting data from the cloud is preventing some organizations from adopting Cloud Computing.
Data Confidentiality and Auditability
“I don’t want to put my corporate data in the cloud.” Personally my mmind says this many times. Current cloud offerings are essentially public (rather than private) networks, exposing the system to more attacks. There are also requirements for auditability, in the sense of Sarbanes-Oxley and Health and Human Services Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations that must be provided for corporate data to be moved to the cloud.
Data Transfer Bottlenecks
Applications continue to become more data-intensive. If we assume applications may be “pulled apart” across the boundaries of clouds, this may complicate data placement and transport. At $100 to $150 per terabyte transferred, these costs can quickly add up, making data transfer costs an important issue. Cloud users and cloud providers have to think about the implications of placement and traffic at every level of the system if they want to minimize costs. This kind of reasoning can be seen in Amazon’s development of their new Cloudfront service. One opportunity to overcome the high cost of Internet transfers is to ship disks.
Bugs in Large-Scale Distributed Systems
One of the difficult challenges in Cloud Computing is removing errors in these very large scale distributed systems. A common occurrence is that these bugs cannot be reproduced in smaller configurations, so the debugging must occur at scale in the production datacenters. One opportunity may be the reliance on virtual machines in Cloud Computing.
Scaling Quickly
Pay-as-you-go certainly applies to storage and to network bandwidth, both of which count bytes used. Computation is slightly different, depending on the virtualization level. Google AppEngine automatically scales in response to load increases and decreases, and users are charged by the cycles used. The opportunity is then to automatically scale quickly up and down in response to load in order to save money, but without violating service level agreements.
Reputation Fate Sharing
Reputations do not virtualize well. One customer’s bad behavior can affect the reputation of the cloud as a whole. An opportunity would be to create reputation-guarding services similar to the “trusted email” services currently offered (for a fee) to services hosted on smaller ISP’s, which experience a microcosm of this problem.
Software Licensing
Current software licenses commonly restrict the computers on which the software can run. Users pay for the software and then pay an annual maintenance fee. The primary opportunity is either for open source to remain popular or simply for commercial software companies to change their licensing structure to better fit Cloud Computing.
Source : Berkeley researchers
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