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This new post shines a light on how Cloud Computing and Virtualization can improve your costs and make a better use of your computing power and resources. It was written by our colleague João Moradei here at Locaweb. It´s a great help for those who are starting to analyze the possibility of moving to the cloud. Enjoy!

How Cloud Computing and Virtualization can improve your costs and make a better use of your computing power and resources. by João Felipe Moradei

Cloud Computing is the new fancy term in the IT world. But how, specifically, can an efficient Cloud Computing Infrastructure be obtained?
First, the definition of Cloud Computing is generally accepted as a model where the computing infrastructure (processors, storage and software) is somewhere, somebody is responsible for it, and you just have to use it, via internet, for example. You don’t have to know how it works, what it takes to be working and what will have to be done if something goes wrong. You just have to use it.

E-mail, for example, is a way of demonstrating one of the applications of cloud computing – services like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or Gmail. You have your account stored in a server but you don’t know where it is, what this machine looks like, and you don’t have to worry about securing your information. These concerns and responsibilities are held by the ones providing the service.

But how can cloud computing help you and your business, and how can you use it?

The first and best reason is cost reduction, because you don’t need to worry about having machines to support your business, buying equipment, hiring communication links, having expensive warranty contracts, or building a special room or area to keep your equipment secure and cool. And above all this, you won’t have to buy it all over again when it’s outdated or is not enough for your business anymore.

Since you don’t have to maintain all this equipment with you, it’s obvious you are going to save on energy consumption. And nowadays this process is interesting even for the companies providing the Cloud Computing service as well, because the new equipment uses the energy in a smarter way, casting only the “horsepower” it takes to keep the services running. Therefore, the use of Cloud Computing can, in a broader view, help reduce the energy consumption to levels never thought of before.
You can have instant upgrades, or they might only take a server reboot. The resources can be rearranged in order to improve your server performance and provide a better service for your clients. The virtual servers can be tailored to support the service they will hold, and a better usage of the equipment available can be obtained. Also, as said before, you don’t have to worry about outdated equipment anymore.

The storage space can be adjusted as needed, which means that you can hire a certain amount of disk space for your service and, whenever your business grows, and the amount of data stored grows as well, the infrastructure will be prepared to provide as much space as your business may require.

A major point of concern regarding technology environments has always been high availability. And it can be obtained with a Cloud environment. The servers are hosted in a powerful machine, of course, but not just one! Many servers running in parallel are set to handle the load in order to keep your business running if something goes wrong with a physical machine. The virtual servers in a physical host are automatically transferred to other available hosts in case this server cannot comply with its tasks anymore.

And, finally, since most of the computing power is held by the servers, less computing power is required on the client’s side. It means that more and more people may use your services without the need of having powerful machines, making it even more popular.

After presenting all these advantages of using Cloud Computing and the benefits you may obtain by using it, don’t you think it’s time to start looking for a professional Cloud Computing service provider? Check out Locaweb’s Cloud Server Pro and see which service we have that best fits your needs.

I decided to compile this list of 10 signs you need to move to the Cloud after searching online for a good checklist and not finding any good ones. I believe that these things are the best indicators that your company should be considering a cloud infrastructure.

1. Your server workloads vary wildly over time, and you need to provision additional resources to accommodate peak workloads that go largely unused the majority of time.

This is a classic sign and the most noticeable benefit of cloud servers. Since they are naturally elastic and can be adjusted quickly and even automatically, cloud servers allow companies to avoid investing in infrastructure dimensioned to handle peak loads.

2. There are bottlenecks in application development because of the lead time necessary to prepare development, testing and staging environments.

Cloud server provisioning is extremely quick compared to physical server setup. Additionally, the ready availability of server images makes setting up most environments a matter of selecting an option from a menu and clicking on a button.

3. Your company will have to invest in additional data center resources to expand.

Avoiding capital expenditures is a sound idea in most cases. Buying servers, racks, network equipment and related assets puts a strain on the company’s finances which isn’t easily reversible. On the other hand, cloud computing services are operating expenses and can therefore be interrupted at any time.

4. Your business can’t afford to have any downtime for server upgrades

In businesses such as e-commerce and SaaS applications, downtime translates directly into losses. When a regular server needs to be upgraded, it has to be taken offline and physically shut down for maintenance. This causes varying but inevitably significant amounts of downtime. In the Cloud, servers can be removed individually from the Cloud for maintenance without the customers feeling their absence. In parallel, Cloud Servers can be upgraded and downgraded via software whenever needed, usually with a simple server restart as the only associated downtime.

5. IT staff costs need to be reduced

Maintaining all the necessary IT skills to manage an internal server farm can be taxing on a company. By using servers in a public cloud, companies draw upon the economies of scale that cloud providers have and can significantly reduce the need for infrastructure and operations personnel.

6. Your application ecosystem is becoming too complex to handle

As companies grow, so does the complexity and quantity of systems they maintain in-house. Having applications such as e-mail and CRM systems inside the company structure may make sense when looked at individually, but each added business app adds a layer of necessary administration and may require different expertise to setup and run. By using pre-made server images available from cloud vendors, companies can host these applications in a much more robust environment without the effort of setting up or maintaining them.

7. Your workforce is becoming more mobile and they need access to your business applications and data.

The explosion of mobile platform availability, traffic in major cities and the need to reduce office costs have been driving the adoption of home office solutions and empowering the sales force. To enable this, applications need to be accessible from anywhere with an internet connection, and user data has to be synchronized at all times. Cloud computing is what allows this remote access.

Reseller hosting has been wildly popular among web developers, digital agencies and other multi-website-managing professionals for years. Reseller control panels such as cPanel, Plesk and H-Sphere have been around for a long time. They are excellent for managing multiple customer websites, establishing hosting plans, and in a general sense allow companies that don’t have the necessary resources to create own web hosting operation in a very economical way.

Traditional reseller hosting, however, has serious drawbacks. Being based on single machines, it has all the problems that traditional web hosting has, and then some.

First, a single machine doesn’t scale. You may be able to upgrade hardware, but that requires downtime and it is limited by the supported hardware. For companies to be able to offer low prices on reseller packages, they have to oversell their capacity. The combination of these two factors spells disaster: As resellers add more and more of their customers’ websites to the machine, it’s load increases until it reaches a point where performance becomes an issue. When that time comes, resellers will have to either migrate their customers to another server (with all the pain that that change implies – hard coded IPs in customer programming, anyone?), or weather the storm until enough other tenants move out.

Second, shared infrastructure has an inherent problem when one of the tenants suffers the “digg effect”. Suppose a single website belonging to one reseller’s customer gets listed on a very popular site like digg, or maybe starts a TV campaign. That website will have a traffic spike that will affect access not only to itself, but to its “neighbors” both within the same reseller account and within the same physical machine (which belong to other resellers completely).

Last, but no less important, is the fact that bad things happen. Machines fail, networks fail, people fail. In a traditional hosting setup, customers with more than one website usually have their sites scattered among several machines, and there’s a one-to-one relationship between hardware failure and website downtime. In reseller situtations, however, things are quite different. A hardware failure may take tens, even hundreds of customer websites offline, creating a serious problem for the reseller.

What alternatives are there, one might ask? Well, the same Cloud buzz that’s been all over lately applies to Reseller Hosting as well. Cloud Reseller Hosting is basically a reseller control panel software package installed on a Cloud Server. This setup overcomes the shortcomings of traditional reseller hosting by leveraging the strengths of Cloud Computing.

By having near-endless, on-demand scalability, Cloud Reseller Hosting eliminates the growth problem for its users. Since the Cloud can be upgraded by adding more equipment without interruptions, the reseller provider can avoid bottlenecks by simply planning server capacity to cover growing demand. This translates to a borderless growth for resellers.

Peaks in usage are also no longer a problem, since the cloud naturally has excess capacity available to absorb greater loads. The same reasoning that allows for endless expansion means that resources are always available for bursts in machine usage. This makes cloud reseller hosting much more robust than the common shared reseller setup.

Finally, Clouds offer much better (effective) SLAs than single-server configurations. The fact that a machine can fail and another take its place in a transparent, imperceptible manner makes Cloud Reseller Hosting much less risky for resellers. Lots of reseller hosting providers promise SLAs of even 100%, but basically all that means is that, in case of any downtime, they’ll reimburse the amount paid for that period, sometimes multiplied by some compensating factor. That doesn’t keep the reseller’s customers from being harmed by their websites being offline and contacting the reseller to give him or her a piece of their mind…

So in summary, I believe that Cloud Reseller Hosting is a new, exciting way for digital agencies and web developers to create their own web hosting plans and make money without all the problems associated with single-server reseller hosting. It is now not a question of if, but when, Cloud Reseller Hosting will become mainstream.

Ars Technica has a post today about a study carried out about the evolution of the world’s  total computing and storage power. Among several interesting tidbits of information, one conclusion stands out: The world’s total general-purpose computing power in 2007 was about the same as that of a human brain.

That, in and of itself, is interesting news, especially for those concerned about Skynet and the whole machines-taking-over-the-world thing. After all, if one single human being can process the same amount of operations as all of the world’s computers, we can’t be at risk, right? Right??

Well, I wouldn’t get too cozy yet .

Combining the research findings with Moore’s Law, those that are like me in their late thirties will probably conclude that they don’t need to worry that much, but that our children and grandchildren should definitely teach their machines to play nice in the future.

You see, if the total computing power in 2007 was that of a single human brain, and total computing power doubles every 2 years, then in 2009 the total computing power should be expected to be that of 2 human brains. By the end of 2011, it should be that of 4 human brains. Of course, the world population keeps growing, but nowhere nearly as fast as computing power.

Considering the UN’s average projection, the world’s population in 2100 should be approximately 9 billion people. If we consider it constant at this level between 2007 and 2100 (erring on the side of humankind), then machine computing power should equal that of humanity in little over 33 Moore-cycles, that is, just a bit over 66 years.

Who knows? Maybe in 2073 somebody else might be dealing the cards on our little blue speck of dust…

Today I stumbled upon an interesting discussion about cloud computing in China that brought to mind the regulatory issues involved in Cloud Computing that are starting to pop up all over the world.

Apparently, in China, because of regulations that require a local company to be involved in any business enterprise and also that demand licenses for operating internet services, the Cloud/SaaS/IaaS/PaaS craze might be held back in that country for a while. One user in the discussion mentions that only Chinese companies or companies owned by Chinese holdings may apply for the necessary licenses. Because of this, foreign companies couldn’t legally sell Cloud Services to China.

This could seriously set back the Chinese IT services industry, and doesn’t seem like something to be expected from them. It would be interesting to find out if this is indeed the situation. I’ll update this post as soon as I confirm this.

Wondering how to make money with your programming skills? Don’t have the resources to invest? Try this Gartner projection on for size:

Worldwide mobile application store downloads are forecast to reach 17.7 billion downloads in 2011, a 117 percent increase from an estimated 8.2 billion downloads in 2010, according to Gartner, Inc. By the end of 2014, Gartner forecast over 185 billion applications will have been downloaded from mobile app stores, since the launch of the first one in July 2008.

This is hardly surprising given the amount of buzz surrounding mobile apps these last few years, but it is still huge news for people considering selling their apps online. The world of app store-based sales has opened a whole new frontier to individual programmers and small shops. The fees are steep (usually around 30-50%), but are well worth it given the fact that app stores give application creators a capilarity they’d be hard-pressed to find otherwise.

So gather your creativity, call your programming buddies, and get to it! App store riches await!

One of the most useful aspects of Cloud Computing is the possibility it opens to users of having access to their data and applications wherever they are, on a variety of platforms. The tablet “arms race” started in 2010 has brought this even more into the spotlight.

Moving a company to a DVI (Desktop Virtualization Infrastructure), however, is not a matter of click-click-done. It is a strategic IT decision, and poses many challenges. Many articles have been written about this, but a few most pressing issues come to mind:

• Choosing a vendor: From Google and their cloud-based notebook solution to VMWare, Citrix, and Microsoft, everyone wants a piece of the action.
• Selecting a platform: In-house or third-party hosted servers? Many companies still have a hard time trusting hosted clouds for their business applications.
• User experience: Users might find working on the cloud “clunky” or “slow”, and it might not be anything to do with the DVI. For this kind of application where users are accustomed to instant machine response, things such as connection speed is critical.
• Technological challenges: Keeping user’s work from being lost when moving between environments or making physical equipment (USB devices, printers) interact with cloud desktop applications are just a few examples of matters that will have to be addressed when companies virtualize.
• Licensing: Being very new, this market is still maturing, and involved businesses will have to adapt. A sign of this are the recent extensive changes to Microsoft’s licensing model for virtual desktops. Licensing prices may make or break the case for virtualization depending on the company considering it.

That all said, there are many benefits to adopting a DVI, depending of course on the type of business. This will probably evolve to a point where all businesses will benefit from having their desktop applications on cloud servers. Some of the main benefits are:

• Deployment: Creating a new user machine in a virtualized environment is practically instantaneous, standards are maintained, and the chance for error is much smaller.
• Remote access: Users can use their desktops from any connected device, anywhere.
• Reduction of hardware investments: Many users can share the same equipment in a safe manner, each with his own customized desktop. Also, the fact that the heavy lifting is done on the cloud server side means that client machine life can be greatly extended.
• Backup and disaster recovery: Since user data is kept in the cloud, tasks such as backups and disaster recovery are greatly simplified and optimized.
• Security: Also because user data is not in individual machines, it is much easier to control how corporate resources are being used and to keep machines secure from malware threats.

And that’s just to name a few. Desktop virtualization is still in its infancy and has much to evolve, and has great potential both as a market and as an efficiency driver for companies that choose to adopt it.

Yesterday Joaquim Torres, Locaweb’s product director, wrote a post entitled Software craftsmanship, programming, and how to choose a professional, commenting on Dan North’s article, “Programming is not a Craft”. Dan’s post, which has the programming community up in flames, is about whether the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship is valid in its main argument that programming should be considered a craft and not a science.

Both article’s are very interesting in their argumentation, in the sense that both Dan and Joaquim recognize the importance of well-written software and good programmers, while at the same time also recognizing that the value of software can better be measured by the problems it solves.

Joaquim also suggests that, like choosing a doctor, choosing a programmer is a difficult task, since there is little way of knowing beforehand the exact level of ability of the professional, even an experienced one. I believe that that difficulty stems from the exact same fact that invalidates the software as a craft argument: that working software can be produced by both good and bad programmers, with obviously varying levels of investment in time and money.

That said, I’d like to add another element to the discussion. The word “guild” didn’t show up in this discussion yet, so I’d like to explore that a little further. As wikipedia defines it:

“A guild is an association of craftsmen in a particular trade. The earliest types of guild were formed as confraternities of workers. They were organized in a manner something between a trade union, a cartel and a secret society. They often depended on grants of letters patent by an authority or monarch to enforce the flow of trade to their self-employed members, and to retain ownership of tools and the supply of materials.”

Strong words such as “cartel” and “secret society” may seem harsh, but the fiery comments on Dan’s post make the Manifesto seem to be a sort of guild charter, and I’m sure that was not its intention.

Adding up everything, there is merit in the idea that good programmers should be a real community. The difficult process of selecting good professionals with the right references is a whole lot easier for technologies for which there is an established community.

In a recent report by the European Union’s Network and Information Agency, the Enisa proposes a detailed framework for deciding on which cloud computing deployment method is most adequate for governmental use. In its SWOT analysis, the report states that for sensitive applications private clouds were much more adequate. The reason they stated that is that public clouds could be owned by companies from outside the EU, and that might create issues with transparency and governance.

I’ve been reading a lot into what the cloud security paranoia is about, and believe I’ve found a pattern. Usually, articles and discussions go on about “The need to guarantee cloud security” and how CIOs/CFOs/CEOs still don’t trust cloud server setups for their most important business apps. Invariably, the fears are seemingly amorphous, undefined, much as the cloud itself. I think that the industry is suffering from growing pains, much like the web hosting industry did way back in the day. More »