Musings on Tech

Are all Clouds the same.  No. Actually Cloud computing  is an umbrella term that is used to indicate a set of services provided over the net.  At a broad level, the services can be grouped under the following head a) IAAS - Infrastructure as a Service b) PAAS - Platform as a Service c) SAAS - Software as a Service. There are other groupings like DAAS for Data as a Service, MAAS, Monitoring as a Service, etc. But the three mentioned above cover the significant chunk of the offerings currently available on the Cloud.  In this blog, I do not intend to go about defining these all over again.  One can just google on these titles and should be able to get detailed information on each of these.  What I intend to provide is few images which I picked over the net ( I have referenced the source for each of the images) that provide a quick snapshot on what each of the services offer and its value preposition. So what do these mean? ...

There is a tendency to confuse these both.  Many perceive that having a virtualized infrastructure implies that they are using cloud computing.  But this is not true.  The value benefits offered by these two are different. Virtualization is a technique to logically create multiple hardware platforms  out of a physical hardware system.  What it implies is that,  using Virtualization techniques one is able to create multiple logical hardware devices with allocated processing, memory, storage and network resources out of a single physical device. Technically speaking, virtualization uses a software called Hypervisor which acts as the layer between the hardware drivers in case of bare metal hypervisors (Example: VMWare) or over a host operating system (Example: Microsoft Hyper V)  wand mediates between the multiple virtualized hard ware systems created on the physical device and the drivers for the physical components. Cloud computing is more o...

Is traditional IT dead in the world of Cloud computing? This was an interesting question posed in a conference that I attended over the weekend.  I found the question very intriguing and got me thinking about it.    Let me start with a confession. Have been a great champion of Cloud based services and strongly believe that Cloud computing holds lot of promise and value.  But the question brings up an very interesting point.  Is the role of traditional IT dead and is cloud computing  the primary way forward. So let us look at what defines Cloud computing.  I am not going to get into the definition, If you just search on the "Cloud computing definition" on goggle, you would get myriad definitions. But my view is that there is no universally accepted definition on the same. One can find some of the definitions of Cloud computing here .   But there is a broad consensus on the benefits that Cloud computing can offer: ...