Innovation & Community Clouds--Part 1: What is a Community Cloud?

In this three part series, I will provide an overview about what community cloud computing is, its benefits, and its disadvantages, and how it applies to real life examples.

We've all heard the term in passing, but, just what is community cloud computing? The NIST defines it as:

"...infrastructure [that] is shared by several organizations and [that] supports a specific community that has shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements, policy, and compliance considerations). It may be managed by the organizations or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise."

Put simply, it's a shared service among a group of organizations that have similar needs or regulatory concerns. The shared service can be infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS), or software (SaaS) and can be deployed in a private or hybrid model depending on the requirements and restrictions. These services are subject to the same criteria applied to cloud computing in general: broad network access to elastic pooled resources on-demand (self-service) in a utility based pricing model.

A community cloud can be created within a horizontal, in which a number of similar organizations participate (such as hospitals), or within a vertical, in which related but dissimilar organizations participate (manufacturer, transportation, wholesaler, retailer, end consumer, etc.).

Naturally, in any case where resources are shared among partners, an agreement must necessarily be in place to regulate and manage its usage. In either of the cases above, all participating organizations must agree on the nature of the services (including adherence to the strictest - often regulatory - requirements applicable to the partner organizations), how they will be shared, and on the procurement method for payment purposes.

As an example, the NYSE announced in a recent press release that it had built a cloud computing environment called the "Capital Markets Community Platform" through which they could "...enable customers to easily purchase the computing power required at a given time so they can focus on their core business strategy rather than complex IT infrastructure design and maintenance. It provides direct, on-demand access to the entire NYSE Technologies portfolio of high-performance, low-latency services..." Clearly, the NYSE and its partners and customers are constrained by security and regulatory requirements common to each of them and the service meets the NIST criteria for community cloud computing mentioned above.

In the next post, we will discuss the benefits of community clouds.

Takeaways from Carrier Cloud Forum @ Interop 2011

Today's takeaways from Interop 2011--Carrier Cloud Forum panel on "Building the On-Demand Cloud Infrastructure".

• Private cloud, by definition, is not "infinitely" scalable like Amazon's EC2. The resources required to build such a solution would be prohibitive. In addition, private clouds are commonly being delivered and managed by service providers. Because of these characteristics, there are some that claim that private cloud is not truly cloud computing. Of course, managed services have been around a long time and there are still efficiencies to be had for customers who take advantage of carriers' economies of scale and scope.
• Why service providers, why cloud?
• Billing is crucial: unified billing is a major advantage for carriers who offer end to end services; pipe--DC--cloud in a one-throat-to-choke model. This also allows carriers to provide contractual SLAs on the full service offering.
• Carriers already have a critical mass of customers who can benefit from this bundling as well.
• Cloud computing depends on the network working and carriers own the network.
• Carriers are looking for a partner who can provide a solution that is competitive with the big technology vendors; as robust an offering but with none of the drawbacks of a large organization.
• Cloud computing is pervasive: it is difficult to see where it starts (i.e., define its boundaries) as it encompasses mobile, web, business applications, enterprise 2.0, social media...
• What does "enterprise grade" or "carrier grade" really mean? IaaS is usually referred to as being built on servers that do not have redundancy inherently built into them (e.g., single power source, non-raided drives, etc.). Perhaps its better to drop the "enterprise grade" and simply refer to it as "carrier grade" since carriers have historically been concerned with providing redundant services (such as telephony, internetworking) the logic being that carrier customers want the reassurance that the hardware will be tolerant to failures.

Misc. Tidbits from Interop 2011

This week, at Interop, I attended Private and Public Cloud Days in which speakers discussed the relative merits, drawbacks, and case studies. I've compiled a few ideas that I thought were interesting:

• Regarding private clouds, we have commonly referred to them in the context of dev/test, but in reality, their value is much more important as a way to deliver "IT as a service".
• Since clouds are commonly built on hardware that is not designed with redundancy in mind, cloud computing does not automatically imply redundancy. High availability is included in the architecture of your instance footprint (e.g., no IP hardcoding, no DB source hardcoding, etc.) and application(s) running on it.
• Redundancy costs money. Because of this, your organization needs to understand its tolerance to risk (and recovery point and time objectives (RPO/RTO)) and then design to meet this tolerance level.
• "Big data" should be actionable. Instead of thinking in terms of data, think in terms of business problems and solving those.
• Fear of lock-in from platforms (PaaS) is irrational since programmers have been locking themselves in by the simple act of choosing a programming language.