Cloud Computing and the Lessons from the Past

Abstract

The skyrocketing demand for a new generation of cloud-based consumer and business applications is driving the need for next generation of data centers that must be massively scalable, efficient, agile, reliable and secure. The authors see a parallel between the state of the data centers today and the evolution of the Intelligent Network (IN) infrastructure in telecommunication. The telecommunications networks have for many years, demonstrated their ability to reliably enable network (voice) services creation, assurance and delivery on a massive scale. Based on an analysis of the Intelligent Networks in telecommunications to identify proven concepts and key lessons that can be applied to enable next generation IT datacenters experience this paper asserts that: (1) In order to scale cloud services reliably to millions of service developers and billions of end users the next generation cloud computing and datacenter infrastructure will have to follow an evolution similar to the one that led to the creation of scalable telecommunication networks. (2) In the future network-based cloud service providers will leverage virtualization technologies to be able to allocate just the right levels of virtualized compute, network and storage resources to individual applications based on real-time business demand while also providing full service level assurance of availability, performance and security at a reasonable cost. (3) A key component - identified in this paper as the Virtual Resource Mediation Layer (VRML), must be developed through industry collaboration to enable interoperability of various public and private clouds. This layer will form the basis for ensuring massive scalability of cloud infrastructure by enabling distributed service creation, service delivery and service assurance without any single vendor domination. (4) The next generation virtualization technologies must allow applications to dynamically access CPU, memory, bandwidth and storage (capacity, I/O and throughput) in a manner similar to that of the telecommunications 800 Service Call Model with one level of indirection and mediation. The authors believe that the next generation cloud evolution is a fundamental transformation - and not just an evolutionary stack of XaaS implementations, which will enable global service collaboration networks utilizing optimally distributed and managed computing, network and storage resources driven in real-time by business priorities.