The cloud like everything else (big data, vitualization, SDN), are not “conceptually”, new ideas. Every future “incarnation” of a past idea does however
differ in scope, capability and opportunity.
For over a decade people have been mulling on what “cloud” means. Not wishing to continue beating a dead horse,
I want to instead focus on factors that influenced the concepts that led to
what we call as cloud today. Generally
a lot of credit is given to Salesforce and Amazon AWS as trailblazers to cloud
computing. True as it maybe, there is always
a story behind the story. This is my
story.
I did not invent this incarnation of the cloud, but I am fortunate to have worked with folks like Khalidi, Hisgen, Penkler, Schroepher, and many others, who helped create the initial concepts. Most of all, I am deeply privileged to have eventually led pioneering efforts that directly influenced/resulted in cloud computing as we know it today.
My personal story on cloud computing evolved as a result of work on a single system image (multiple machines running a single operating system across them). The clustering group at Sun, while building an SSI (single system image), had an epiphany. Why create a single system image when a “perception” of a single system image may be sufficient to achieve high availability goals? In doing so, we focused on creating this “perception” by virtualizing OS services (like: devices, file system, network, host applications, ..) across multiple machines. This virtualization layer later influenced the thinking/foundation of a revolutionary project at Sun called N1.
Its at this point in time when we had another epiphany. Could we extended this concept of “perception” and “virtualization”, from Sun Cluster into systems management, such that we could manage N systems as though they were 1 (N1)? In doing so, could we then help balance a customer’s costs, risks and service level in a more optimal way? Sun then embarked on realizing the dream of N1 (the predecessor to what we now call as IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service).
At the time, other system companies, feeling left out, publicly coined similar concepts: IBM with Autonomic Computing, HP with Adaptive infrastructure, even Microsoft got in on the act with Dynamic Systems Interface.
While N1 and others, took a ground up approach (IaaS) to building what we call as “private clouds”, a parallel top down effort (SaaS) with ASP like capability was quickly evolving into “public cloud” services. Then with the launch of Salesforce and Amazon’s AWS services, the term “cloud” got cemented in history.
Though this is not a complete list of offerings, I have attempted to sketch out a very rough time line of this evolution.
I thoroughly enjoyed my time in N1. Under my watch, back in 2005, we had even demonstrated live migration of fully saturated Oracle instances from one physical machine to another in a matter of minutes. Sadly, it was way ahead of its time and eventually N1 faded from Sun’s history with parts of it being used in various other initiatives. Though there were many issues to tackle in the evolution of N1, the biggest problems to overcome had to do with human behavior.
I did not invent this incarnation of the cloud, but I am fortunate to have worked with folks like Khalidi, Hisgen, Penkler, Schroepher, and many others, who helped create the initial concepts. Most of all, I am deeply privileged to have eventually led pioneering efforts that directly influenced/resulted in cloud computing as we know it today.
My personal story on cloud computing evolved as a result of work on a single system image (multiple machines running a single operating system across them). The clustering group at Sun, while building an SSI (single system image), had an epiphany. Why create a single system image when a “perception” of a single system image may be sufficient to achieve high availability goals? In doing so, we focused on creating this “perception” by virtualizing OS services (like: devices, file system, network, host applications, ..) across multiple machines. This virtualization layer later influenced the thinking/foundation of a revolutionary project at Sun called N1.
Its at this point in time when we had another epiphany. Could we extended this concept of “perception” and “virtualization”, from Sun Cluster into systems management, such that we could manage N systems as though they were 1 (N1)? In doing so, could we then help balance a customer’s costs, risks and service level in a more optimal way? Sun then embarked on realizing the dream of N1 (the predecessor to what we now call as IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service).
At the time, other system companies, feeling left out, publicly coined similar concepts: IBM with Autonomic Computing, HP with Adaptive infrastructure, even Microsoft got in on the act with Dynamic Systems Interface.
While N1 and others, took a ground up approach (IaaS) to building what we call as “private clouds”, a parallel top down effort (SaaS) with ASP like capability was quickly evolving into “public cloud” services. Then with the launch of Salesforce and Amazon’s AWS services, the term “cloud” got cemented in history.
Though this is not a complete list of offerings, I have attempted to sketch out a very rough time line of this evolution.
I thoroughly enjoyed my time in N1. Under my watch, back in 2005, we had even demonstrated live migration of fully saturated Oracle instances from one physical machine to another in a matter of minutes. Sadly, it was way ahead of its time and eventually N1 faded from Sun’s history with parts of it being used in various other initiatives. Though there were many issues to tackle in the evolution of N1, the biggest problems to overcome had to do with human behavior.
No comments:
Post a Comment