Clouds are still vapour, Grids are real.

With all the hype and confusion surrounding cloud computing, we feel its necessary for DNS Europe to state its position on the relationship, as we see it, between grid hosting and cloud computing. Our hope is that our customers will then understand more about our longer term strategy and see how they can best fit our offering into their own future-view of this rapidly emerging technology.

The vision of global cloud computing

The ultimate promise of cloud computing is that open frameworks will appear allowing previously unconnected physical resources to be seamlessly integrated into coherent globally-accessible cloud computing environments. These clouds will be capable of supporting any web or enterprise application requirements whether it be compute-power resources, storage, application appliances, bandwidth, nomadic subscriber access, hybrid system integration. Basically, you name it, whatever problems we currently have will eventually be fixed by cloud computing... apparently.

At DNS Europe, we prefer to take a slightly more pragmatic view of cloud computing very much based on 3 simple criteria:

1. What technology works for our customers today?
2. How can we help our customers make the most out of this technology today?
3. How can we help our customers prepare for tomorrow?

Grids are the building blocks of future clouds

Without knowing today exactly what the future of cloud computing will look like, customers are faced with the decision of what choices to make that give real commercial benefits today and greatest flexibility for tomorrow. As we see it, future clouds will be formed from and accessible by those customers which adopt grid hosting infrastructures, develop multi-tennant applications and offer services that are not tethered by specific location, operating system, physical resources or other geographical constraints. Not only will they be able to integrate with future clouds but they will be best placed to take advantage of other cloud-enabled services and to offer their own services to other cloud contributors.

Clouds should not and will not be "owned"

The term cloud computing is today being used by many providers who, in fact, are actually offering Grid Hosting. Taking Google and Amazon as examples, they have opened up their own infrastructure for customers to deploy their own applications on their "clouds" and use their compute resources for a measured service fee. More correctly, these infrastructures should be called "grids" and the services called "Utility Computing". Where these offerings substantially differ from our believe of what Cloud Computing will become is in their attempt to own the cloud. Ultimately we believe that this is a futile effort due to the pace of change of market requirements and their restricted service platform development capabilities. Provided that they eventually adopt the principles of open platform integration, they will however become very serious components of the future of cloud computing.

From grids to clouds

Under perhaps the simplest model for differentiating grids and clouds, grids are essentially building blocks, or discrete physical resources that will one day make up, or enable, clouds. One of the key drivers for businesses must therefore be to invest in a technology which facilitates the easiest transition from one to the other. A technology which will enable real cost savings today with open opportunities for tomorrow. A technology which provides a birthing ground for new application and service architectures which will one day fly the nest and reach full maturity in "the cloud".

This is where we believe that 3Tera are defining the model by which this technology will mature. Today, with AppLogic, customers can achieve enormous reductions in costs compared to traditional clustered-hosting solutions. Developers can access massively powerful virtual infrastructure tools on a pay-per-use basis and service providers can bring new value added hosted services to market in a fraction of the time with a fraction of the administration and support overheads.

The fact that the AppLogic grid hosting operating system can be installed by any service provider is what propels this technology to the forefront of open-standards development for future cloud computing. 3Tera's upcoming Cloudware platform, based on the AppLogic OS, is the next iteration of inter-grid cooperation (aka: cloud computing) based on open standards and will be vendor agnostic so that third parties, not just 3Tera, can participate in the system.

We are not saying that 3Tera will ever "own the cloud", this is not their strategy. Instead they are aiming to create a pervasive open platform that we as a service provider and our customers can use to propel our businesses forward and establish cooperation based on least-cost service provision with other similarly-enabled companies across the globe.