Humour

Pushing the cloud

Cloud computing is here to stay, reiterates T A Balasubramanian

“You were talking about cloud computing, and Thunder Bolt, nabob,” says Danny DeVito, your biped walking CTO at Baffle Corporation. He is accompanying you as you resume your tour of the Techno Over-exposition of Geeks and Gizmos for Lazy Enterprises (TOGGLE), an IT trade fair. You, Papyrus Bytewala, CIO of Baffle, on the other hand, have been leading your CTO into the secrets of IT marketing in the rough and tumble environment of exhibitions.

DeVito is addressing an old friend, Nawab Ghoda Ghallstone, Junior, a voluble technology showman, a real nawab by birth, and the founder and CEO of Ghallstone Labs. The man is a jocular story-teller, punctuating his strident sales pitches with wild tales of technological derring-do and sometimes plain nonsense that he concocts without missing a step.

“Ah, yes, of course, DeVito,” snorts the nawab with a laugh. “Basically, cloud computing means that you would be getting all your IT resources—processing, storage, messaging, databases and so on—from somewhere outside your own four walls, and paying only for what you use. Thunder Bolt, you see, is my gateway to this world in which a handful of lucky and brilliant business wizards will be able to tap humanity’s smartness and creativity for free. Just like YouTube and Wikipedia are already doing now, while putting legions of IT professionals out of work.”

“Hold on, nawab, it seems that we are jumping into something that seems way too premature for a Baffle-size company such as ours,” says DeVito. “You talk about dispensing with the in-house IT guys and not having to buy and maintain servers? Sending off our applications to run somewhere in the great new cloud, we know not where? Why would we want to do this? Software rental is cheap, no doubt, but what if the nebulous network or cloud provider goes down? At least with my PC I can still work on a local version, disconnected from the network.”

“Danny is right, nawab—anyway, most desktop systems are actually becoming cloud connections,” you say, joining the debate. “Using a search engine is now second nature for anyone working on a PC. And that in no way makes the low-cost PC and my server farms redundant. What the heck do most people use to connect to the Internet with? A PC. Some software will be Internet-based and some will be desktop based. Most computing platforms of the future will be a mix of both. So let’s bring the discussion back to the ground.”

“Ah, you are still earthlings, Papyrus, when you should be looking up there,” says the nawab, pointing to the sky with both hands. “You forget that for your low-cost PC and the server farms in your backyard, you will need space, climate control, software vendors holding up your platform, commodity hardware vendors supporting your platform in future years, a backup solution, security firewalls and many people with special skills such as young DeVito here and you yourself—all adding to your company costs.”

“We prefer not to be clubbed along with the rest of the laundry list, thank you,” you say wryly.

“Of course not, Papyrus,” says the nawab, oozing and unctuous as he smiles. “But you will agree that there are a lot of bloat factors in the costs of running an in-house IT department, eh? Now, if nobody is smitten by my offer and refuses to move to the cloud, your cheap server farms would become sweet sauce for the many eager vendors who will compete to make it easy for you. But what if there is a gold rush for growth in the cloud at some point, and the big-gorilla vendors start twisting the arms of software vendors to move to the cloud—who, then, is going to want to sell stuff for your little server farm?”

“Maybe that will happen, maybe not,” you counter. “Do you have an example of how the cloud actually worked for someone?”

“Indeed I do, Papyrus. A good case study of how cloud power can make a little muscle go a long way is that of Animo. This little application creates custom, fully produced videos from the images and music you select. It is like tossing a bunch of steel, glass and leather into a box, shaking it up and then opening the box to find a brand new Ferrari. Animo gives a free video presentation to anyone who signs up for its service, and when it started up, about 5,000 people a day were trying it. Then, a few months later, Facebook users went into a small frenzy over the application, and Animo had nearly 750,000 people sign up in three days. At the peak, almost 25,000 people tried Animo in a single hour.”

“Wow! That’s like a cow jumping over the moon,” says DeVito.

“That’s right, Danny,” says the nawab, grinning. “To satisfy that leap in demand with servers, Animo would have needed to multiply its resources nearly a hundredfold, but they had neither the money to build significant server capacity nor the skills to manage it. So they took a close look at our Thunder Bolt services—which we use to design applications for Amazon on their Elastic Compute Cloud.”

“What happened?”

“It paid off handsomely during that three-day surge in growth, when Animo did not buy or configure a single new server. Instead, it added capacity on Amazon, at the cost of about 10 cents a server per hour. While there were glitches—it was a big spike, even for the giant Amazon—none of them were major. And when the rush slowed down, Animo automatically lowered its server use, and its bill.”

“That sounds interesting,” you concede, reluctantly. After all, one does not argue against the tide, especially if it comes this vociferously.

“The great thing about Thunder Bolt,” says the nawab, waving his hand expansively, “is that anyone who works with software can use it to cheaply and quickly test an idea—and that is even true for companies that are not in the software business. We have had an executive at a financial services firm who used our service to test a concept that was not provided resources by his company’s IT department. Not that we encourage such rebellious behavior,” he hastens to add, noting your expression.

“No doubt, the cloud is here to stay, nawab,” you say. “But before we hand over the keys of the IT kingdom to the World Wide Computer, maybe it is all right to have these queasy feelings about who is responsible for what inside this cloud, and who will be left holding the bag when things go wrong? What about privacy and security? Do we let anyone fish through our corporate files? Wade through our innermost secrets?”

“Ah, Papyrus, with Thunder Bolt, we can assure you that nothing will be left to chance. Don’t worry, we may cost more, but we don’t outsource our IT, your data is safe under our roof with our own carefully screened employees.”

“That is absolutely charming, nabob,” says DeVito, winking. “With that kind of reassurance, who knows, you may even compute happy days all year round for us with a package called Sun Beam.”

“It would be my pleasure to do so,” says the nawab, bowing a little.