More Reflections on the Cloud
Cloud computing, the latest and greatest trend of the IT world, has become a central element of Ubuntu’s server strategy. With this development in mind, I’ve given some thought lately to how much of my electronic life actually depends on access to “the cloud.”
Although cloud computing remains a somewhat ambiguous concept, most definitions center around the consolidation of services and resources into centralized servers, which then deliver those services over the network. This architecture provides greater scalability and cost efficiency than most traditional computing models, which focus on distributing workloads across individual workstations, which leads to redundancy and management difficulties.
As Canonical server product manager Nick Barcet wrote on WorksWithU last week, support for cloud computing has been a major focus in Ubuntu server edition starting with version 9.04, which introduced Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, and continuing with the upcoming 9.10 release. Ubuntu’s cloud strategy focuses on making it easy for users to shift their computing needs into KVM-based virtual machines that can be scaled to meet the task at hand.
My life in the cloud
I’m an individual, not an enterprise, so the benefits offered to me by cloud computing may not align precisely with those of Ubuntu server edition’s target user base. Nonetheless, I’ve grown highly dependent in the last few years on services that fall within the realm of cloud-based computing, for instance:
- Email: although I still use the desktop client Evolution to manage my mail, I stopped copying messages to local disk long ago, and now count on the cloud for accessing all of my communications. As far as email goes, the workstation no longer matters.
- Personal organization: I use a personal wiki running on a Web server to manage a wide range of professional and academic information. The wiki has replaced notes I used to take by hand or on local machines, and its existence in the cloud, where it’s always accessible to me no matter which computer I happen to be working from, is an important element in its utility.
- Remote desktop: I’ve recently begun experiments in sharing Gnome sessions over the network via the XDMCP protocol in order both to consolidate my data and make more efficient use of old computers. Because of bandwidth limitations and security issues, XDMCP is only practical within a private network, but I’d love to find ways to use it or something similar on a larger scale, and the potential for doing so exists in the cloud.
- Compiling: compiling code can take a long time, especially when the compiler is competing for resources with bulky desktop applications, or gets interrupted when the machine is suspended. Having access to computers in the cloud allows me to perform resource-intensive tasks in an efficient environment and without their getting in the way of my ordinary tasks.
I don’t think my experience with cloud computing is very unique, and its growing importance in the lives of ordinary computer users as well as enterprises highlights the potential that the cloud represents for Ubuntu and other Linux distributions. By making it easy to turn an Ubuntu server into a cloud host and offer the kind of consumer-oriented services described above, Canonical is making a wise investment in an emerging market.
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“Because of bandwidth limitations and security issues, XDMCP is only practical within a private network, but I’d love to find ways to use it or something similar on a larger scale, and the potential for doing so exists in the cloud.”
I’m not sure if it fits into this whole “cloud” fad, but FreeNX will do the same thing over the Internet, securely and with low bandwidth requirements. I don’t know why it isn’t installed and enabled as Ubuntu’s “Remote Desktop” by default…
[…] http://www.workswithu.com/2009/09/14/more-reflections-on-the-cloud/ a few seconds ago from web […]
When you referred to XDMCP, I also immediately thought about the NX protocol. For example, Eric Hammond’s Ubuntu and Debian desktop AMIs listed on http://alestic.com come with a FreeNX server by default. With an NX client on your computer, you can run an Ubuntu desktop on Amazon EC2. I tried it a couple of months ago, and the remote FreeNX desktop on EC2 is so responsive that you easily forget that you are working on a remote machine “in the cloud”.
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“Although cloud computing remains a somewhat ambiguous concept” …
For me cloud computing has always been a return to the client/server model where a terminal, dumb or otherwise, relies on a server to deliver useful services.
The only differences today are scale and commercial opportunities. The cloud can function on local and global scales and we don’t need armies of internal IT staff to get it set up and keep it running. Google, IBM, Canonical, Red Hat and others will all be happy to provide this service for an affordable price.
Which means even small businesses can really start to leverage the internet to punch well above their weight.
Public Clouds: ARE NOT AN OPTION if you or your bussines have ANY sensitive data… will you put your critical and private bussiness information into somebody elses servers?
(Canonical, IBM, Microsoft, Google… you-name-it)?
It might just be useful for very small bussines with net or IT needs not attached to their main bussines (a small car repair center, for instance) and NOT having any IT staff at all.
Private Clouds like UBUNTU current one ARE NOT PRACTICAL as they DON’T (YET) PROVIDE REDUNDANCY AND REPLICATION…
WITHOUT REDUNDANCY AND REPLICATION A PRIVATE CLOUD IS USELESS!!!!
I mean it’s cool that I can play with disk images (possibly precooked) of virtual systems and that I can put more or less resouces to work on them instead of doing the same iron-per-iron… but in a traditional server room if a server fails usually one or two services fail… whereas in the private clould chances are that JUST ONE server that fails makes the WHOLE cloud fail or most services at once…UNLESS you had that data replication and service redundancy that CURRENTLY Ubuntu/Eucaliptus cloud does not provide.
For now (even at Lucid release) its a good toy to play with, but nothing more.