During conversations I always hear the opinion that cloud computing is a purely technological approach and it was just developed to help companies to operate more scalable, flexible, etc. Well, on the one hand it’s true. However, I am of the opinion that cloud computing is/ was primarily driven by the business and not by the technologies. But why is that?

Looking back on the development of the three current players (Google, Amazon and Salesforce) in the cloud computing market we can deduce many things, but mainly evident similarities, demonstrating that cloud computing is a business-driven approach.

As many might think cloud computing did not enter the stage suddenly. No, it has grown over time! Google and Amazon had never set the goal at the beginning: „Hey, now we’re doing cloud computing and offer services ‚on demand‘ and on the basis of ‚pay as you go‘ over the Internet“. That is exactly what many vendors do who jump on the current cloud computing train. No, the reasons of Google and Amazon are simple. In each case, it’s their core business, which lets them „forced“ to develop and use cloud computing technologies.

Why Google needs Cloud Computing?

Considering the core business of Google, here is the search and indexing of the Internet in the foreground. The expansion of their infrastructure has finally makes it to develop more and more applications and services.

Why Amazon needs Cloud Computing?

At first Amazon’s core business is the webshop plus the downstream processes behind, like logistics, data warehouse etc. Through the steadily development of their infrastructure, apart from the Amazon Web Services, more resource-hungry applications can be included in the portfolio.

Why Salesforce needs Cloud Computing?

Well, Salesforce is a little more special. From the beginning Salesforce precisely aligned their business model to deliver software as a service as their core business.

Similarities!

Having a look at the similarities (challenges) all of the three are faced with to pursue their core business, it becomes clear why cloud computing primarily has been driven by the actual core business, thus by the Business.

• High computational power
• High performance
• High availability
• High reliability
• High scalability

Conclusion!

Cloud computing is primarily a business driven concept, which is optimally supported by the combination of technological developments in recent years.

The cloud is here and nobody will be able to stop this trend! So what’s going on within the cloud?

At first all kind of applications we are still using locally will find the way into a SaaS application. But we still need local mobile apps in situations when we do not have an internet connection. That means that our data will not be fully mobile and a copy of all the things we are working on is stored locally and synchronized when we have an internet connection.

Next, for me a big future trend is an extended PaaS like Development-as-a-Service, where everything is stored and developed in the cloud. There are some solutions yet, but we still need a more and better integrated stack. What I mean is a combination of SaaS plus PaaS, a powerfull solution which implements the whole stack including the image of a company. Just call it „Company Service Broker“. This is for example a broker who is putting the services a company needs together e.g. ERP and CMS. So you do not need one account for each service you have to authorized with. It’s one platform which integrates everything into one application/ frontend with a single sign on for the enduser.

For me it’s inconvenient to work with more than one application. I always have to open up to 5+ browser windows and authorized for each service. So we have the same situation we know from on premise solutions – isolated applications for each problem. One solution for CMS, one for ERP etc. As an example for SaaS: GMail and Salesforce plus other applications. Honestly the integration between Salesforce and Google Apps is not well-engineered so far.

Bottom line: there is a need for one (cloud) interface to the customer.

Image sources: http://www.freshcharacters.com, http://notetoself.us,

This goes to Salesforce, Google Apps and every other vendor on the cloud computing market who is offering a Software-as-a-Service solution. When do you try to provide a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that is based on a REAL pay per use base?

We all here a lot about the benefits of cloud computing like flexibility, scalibility and pay per use. That means you only pay for the resources or the service you actually use. Using Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions you really pay for what you use. For example per hour or per gigabytes. Well, using common SaaS solutions you do not pay for what you use. You pay per user and this per month or per year! Ist this pay per use when you pay per user even when the user do not use the service 3 days a week? NO, this is not pay per use.

Good examples for the big players on the cloud computing market are Salesforce or Google (Apps). Google offers two plans for using „Google Apps for Business“. An annual plan and a flexible plan. The annual plan means you pay $50 per user account per year AND you have an annual contract – duration 1 year! The flexible plan is – like the name – more flexible. You pay $5 per user account per month and you do not have an annual plan. But you have to pay even when your employees are, for example, on vacation!

Salesforce is just as bad! Looking on their Sales Cloud – Group offering you have to pay $15 per user per month and „All per user products require an annual contract.“ So again, you have to pay for a service even when your employees do not use it!

But not only Salesforce or Google Apps go this NOT pay per use way! If you take a look on the whole SaaS market each vendor is offering this model! So, please tell me, where is the real SaaS pay per use model? Where is the real flexibility? Cloud Computing means that I just pay for the service when I am using it! Does that mean that Salesforce, Google Apps and any other SaaS vendor do not offering cloud computing services?

Offering a service over the internet using a webbrowser is not cloud computing per se!

During my research for an article I found an idea every SaaS vendor can use to offer a real pay per use solution. The idea comes from HP and is called SAPS (Application Performance Standard Meter). HP uses it to make a precise daily billing for the SAP systems they are hosting for their customers. On the base of SAPS the resource consumption of every SAP system is measured every five minutes. It’s comparable with a power meter. This requires two measured values: the required processing power and the input / output throughput. With a built-in matrix, the collected data is converted in kiloSAPS-hours and kiloIOPS-hours (IOPS = Input / Output Performance Standard). The customer receives an accurate breakdown of the resources he uses, and an exact assignment to the respective SAP system.

Right this is for SAP systems, but it shows that it is possible to make a precise daily billing for each resource a customer is using. The SaaS vendors just need to do it!

On the 14th of September ’11 eyeOS announced its first cloud desktop Professional Edition. In times of cloud computing you actually need to call it „DaaS“ Desktop-as-a-Service, right?

Well, the idea behind eyeOS is easy. You just need a webbrowser to have access to your working space like spreadsheets, word processors, e-mail etc. You connect to a website, log-in and start to work. And you can do that from wherever you are. In the office, your home office, at Starbucks. Everything you need is a stable internet connection.

Well, after a closer look at the new Professional Edition the internet connection is the biggest problem. Honestly I just have a 2 Mbits connection, but the response time after clicking on something is not as you can „feel“ on your local desktop. The look and feel is copied from the Linux world. This is not surprising, eyeOS started as an open source project and is still very active.

eyeOS is an own operating systems running in your webbrowser. For example it has a taskbar where you can switch between the open applications and an user management system. By default you’ll find applications like a calculator, calendar, chat tool, notepad, contacts manager, word processor, email client and a file explorer. That’s it. I know from previous versions that you can install other applications using the admin panel, but I couldn’t find anything in the test version.

The handling of the word processor (eyeDocs) reminds me on typical word processors of yesteryears. You do not have a lot of functions but actually they are enough for typical things like writing an article. You can compare the range of functions for example with Google Docs.

I would like to write something more about eyeOS. But there is nothing more to say. The range of functions is pretty low and you can do not really amazing things. It’s just an OS in your webbrowser.

Well, Desktop-as-a-Service like eyeOS is the future of desktop services, yes. But not eyeOS itself. Especially the Professional Edition is not business ready so far. It is to slow (ok, my internet connection) and the amount of functionality and applications are not acceptable for companies. Of course you can use eyeOS writing an article and normal things like managing your contacts and the calendar. But I couldn’t find any groundbreaking functionality why using eyeOS in my company. eyeOS is innovative because it runs in the webbrowser without installing everything locally but where is the added value?

Don’t get me wrong, I am a big fan of those kinds of DaaS, because you can work from everywhere and have all your data and applications on board. But eyeOS is not ready to replace common local desktop solutions.

There are a variety of Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings on the market by now. Each supports more or less every modern programming language. But one thing they have all together! Each offering uses a maximum of one Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider. Whether it is a proprietary or a third party. As expected, the infrastructure of AWS is still the preferred choice.

Let’s have a look on a small variety of PaaS offerings and the underlying IaaS offering.

• CloudFoundry, VMware
• cloudControl, AWS
• Google App Engine, Google
• Azure, Windows
• CodeRun, AWS
• Engine Yard, Terremark
• Elastic Beanstalk, AWS

So what is missing is an independent hosted PaaS offering. A real PaaS innovation! A kind of PaaS Broker. SteamCannon goes in this direction. However, he is 1. not an independent hosted service (there is just one AWS AMI available) and 2. only AWS EC2 is currently supported.

Of course, the service must be run on a platform. For this reason, the desire for an independent hosted service is a little bit mistakable initially. But even here, the power of the cloud must be used. The Killer PaaS must not only run as an AMI on one infrastructure, but must be distributed across multiple providers. This has already ensured its reliability.

The Killer

Why I describe this service as a Killer PaaS is easy. It must support all IaaS provider on the market and not just one, plus all popular programming languages. The functionality is quite simple in theory. As a user of the Killer PaaS I have previously registered at different IaaS providers such as AWS, Rackspace, GoGrid, etc. for an account. Alternatively, the Killer PaaS offers me to create one. The credentials for each IaaS provider are deposited, which will be accessible to the Killer PaaS. Here I already can set my primary, secondary, etc. provider. As a user I have nothing to do more.

If I would like to run my applications in the cloud, I upload the code on the killer PaaS. It is now taking care of the rest and deployed the application on my deposited infrastructures. It can either make it arbitrary, since it knows the status of the infrastructure with respect to performance, etc., or it takes the settings I previously defined and distributed the applications to the primary provider. If this is too busy on the secondary, etc.

The killer PaaS is so smart that it distributed the entire application across multiple vendors and thus ensures the best possible performance and availability. If I decided to let the application run on a primary provider and he has now performance or other problems, the Killer PaaS makes sure that more (or all) resources automatically be used from another provider. I know cases in which AWS users couldn’t run new instances in a AWS region because not enough resources were available. However, my application may not notice anything like this. If my application suddenly exposed to an enormous burden, e.g. due to a run of visitors, and the IaaS provider also has a resource bottleneck, the Killer PaaS makes sure that available resources from another IaaS providers will be applied, or other measures are taken.

With such a Killer PaaS even many questions can be answered with respect to SLAs. The reliability and availability of the application here is ensured by the Killer PaaS. Since it is also run over several IaaS provider in the cloud, its availability is also ensured.

So what is needed is an independent Cloud Management Platform such as enstratus, just for PaaS.