Con Cloud Computing

Cloud computing should really be called Cloud Cuckoo Computing, it's just hosting under a more expensive name.

Every so often we seem to need the re-invention of something that we already know and use just to satisfy the needs of marketing. This is understandable but it doesn't help when you are trying to pin down exactly what the "new" idea is and can't help but think that you have seen it all before.

So it is with cloud computing. The name comes from the fairly standard practice of using a cloud to symbolise on a diagram the role of the internet. In this case the idea is that instead of using computers that we own and maintain we simply rent time and storage space on computers that someone else looks after and owns.

This sounds like a good idea, in fact it’s so good we invented it sometime ago and its original form it is called "hosting". Hosting takes a number of forms but essentially you can pay to have an application such as your web site hosted on a web server that you share with other users or you can rent an entire server for your sole use.

The hosting company provides the server, the power to run it, the backup power supply, the cooling, the internet connectivity, data backup and so on… How much you are left to do depends on the level of support offered and on the exactly what is being hosted.

For example, web server hosting generally means that the user has to configure the site and generally maintain it in any way that goes beyond simple backup and reliability issues. If a more specific application is being hosted then the hosting company might configure it for you.

So cloud computing is just another name for hosting, a cynical attempt by the marketing men to make an existing technology sound new and exciting. OK, so there is one new additional factor but it’s fairly obvious. Instead of hosting a web site or a specific application it is perfectly possible to host a virtual machine as the "unit of hosting".

Offerings like Amazon's cloud computing are essentially this but more established hosting companies, like RackSpace, also offer a similar service with a lot less hype.

Essentially the idea is that you configure a virtual server running whatever operating system and applications you like. The disk image of the virtual server is then uploaded to the host and is run whenever needed.

The advantage of this form of hosting is that you can run multiple copies of the image and so achieve scalability – but notice it’s not a very sophisticated form of scalability. You just get more copies of the server.

All of the problems of scaling are still there and cloud computing as an architecture offers no easy solutions – in fact it offers no solutions at all! However, if you have a really good idea then cloud computing based on virtual machines is a low cost way of getting started.

As often stated by its advocates, you can try out a rack full of servers without having to build a machine room of your own and you only have to pay for what you use. Sounds good but how many ideas need this radical approach? Most of the most common groundbreaking applications at the moment are basically Web 2 systems and these need little more than a cluster of web servers by way of support.

In short, the majority of hosting needs are likely to be as well met by traditional web hosting solutions as the more trendy cloud-based solutions. Indeed when you look at Microsoft’s cloud computing offering – codename Azure – it’s difficult to see the difference. An Azure application is basically an ASP .NET application with some restrictions and access to some special data services.

Unless you have a very strange design the whole thing could just as easily be hosted by a standard web server – the only difference is that you wouldn’t necessarily use the term "cloud" in describing it, so it wouldn't sound like you were really at the cutting edge of technology.

Moving on to consider the "special" web services offered to cloud applications you have to wonder yet again how much of it makes sense. All of the cloud-based storage systems have the same fundamental problems – how do you get your data onto them, how do you maintain and update the data and how do you keep control of them?

From a technical point of view you have all of the problems of working with a remote database and from a management and business point of view you have to worry where in the world the data actually is.

We might have good data laws but does the cloud? This is particularly important if you're planning on using one of the 'cloud-plus' offerings that adds Software as a Service. If you let someone else store your data on the cloud, do you have any control over where the data is stored? In most of the current products, the answer is No. In general, these products are being offered by international companies, so your customer data may well end up in countries with no data protection laws. This puts you in direct contravention of the UK's Data Protection Act, which essentially says data has to stay in the EU.

So when it all goes horribly wrong and the data gets out into the wider cloud, who takes the "rap", you or the cloud computing company?

My advice – read the small print first. So far cloud computing, apart from its trendy title, really hasn’t managed to offer anything compelling over and above traditional hosting solutions.

Yes, you can think up applications that might be better implemented as virtual machine cloud computing but these make up a very small proportion of the total.

To be clear – you probably don’t want to host applications such as web sites, even web 2 sites, in the cloud. Traditional web or server hosting does the same job with the same advantages and it's potentially easier and cheaper.

Cloud computing simply confuses – dare I say "clouds" – the issues and raises a false hopes of easy scalable computing.