Basic Facts Everyone Should Know About Clouds

By Gary Olson

THIS IS NOT A WEATHER DISCUSSION

The global pandemic among the many negative aspects, actually had a few upsides. It accelerated the adoption of a number of technologies that were evolving and introduced a number of new technology solutions and workflows that will extend beyond the adjustments made for businesses to continue operating.

One of the technologies whose adoption accelerated is the “cloud”. Everyone knows about the cloud, it is part of our daily conversation, it solves a multitude of problems, it’s an incredible enabler and how did we ever exist without it. However, the term cloud has become a generic reference to a broad selection of products & services that would normally need to be purchased, installed and integrated separately and are now easily available and accessible via a remote connection as an app or via a browser. Even the price point has become more approachable as the cloud has adopted a subscription model. So instead of a one-time cost for an application that might last a few years or through a few iterations of updates, we now enter a credit/debit card that gets charged monthly forever.

If you were somehow stranded on a desert island — one without any connection service, you might ask the obvious question — what is the cloud? The “Cloud” provides a number of different options for a multitude of services. There’s an “As A Service” offering for almost anything, in fact there is an Anything as a Service (XaaS).

At the highest level (pun intended) the cloud provides a core set of offerings that all the other aaS’s are built on.

· SaaS — Software as a Service

· PaaS — Platform as a Service

· Iaas — Infrastructure as a Service

· Storage/Archive is not an aaS but there are a lot of cloud storage services for both business (collaboration, archive, disaster recovery) and consumers (Photo’s, Documents, Sharing, etc.)

One of the best descriptions and explanations of cloud services I’ve seen is the “Pizza as a Service” ( the other PaaS) diagram that explains how cloud works. Here is the original PaaS framework showing the difference between a full on premise application and what happens as it migrates to the cloud, it shows what the vendor provides vs. what the user will continue to support.

Not all clouds are created equal

A recent article in the business section of a well-known newspaper discussed the competition aspect of cloud providers and in doing so revealed one of the ugly truths about the different clouds. They do not play nicely with each other. They are not interoperable and once you move away from the bigger providers, the offerings change significantly. There are cloud offerings to host applications, provide archive and disaster recovery, some are development platforms and some are intermediary services for IoT products.

One of the considerations when building a cloud based product or service is — will it need access to other services that may be in a different cloud. AND if you are an end user of cloud offerings, are all the services in the same cloud? If they are not and integration is required, then the user needs to build an intermediary device to host the various API’s to arbitrate the different cloud services and ultimately post the fully integrated system to their cloud of choice. If a vendor wants their product accessible in all the popular clouds, they will need to have multiple versions of their product as each cloud has its own specifications that are not compatible with other cloud configurations.

It’s almost like the mobile app issue, different versions for each OS, manufacturer and carrier, and sometimes different products from the same manufacturer will not support certain versions of an app. But I digress.

The lack of interoperability between cloud providers is going to become a difficult challenge for businesses. Once a business commits to a cloud provider, uploads content and hosts applications, they are locked into that vendor “forever”. There is no competitive opportunity to manage costs or prevent the service provider from changing policies and/or raising rates. There’s very little recourse if there’s a service outage, as there is a limited capability to have a backup in another cloud since the programming for each cloud is different and failover would need to be handled out of the cloud, and the entire set of services would need to be fully pre-configured and not rely on the cloud with the outage.

As media companies commit to putting high resolution content in the cloud, should they need to move it to another cloud provider, it’s a full restore download and then re-upload to the new location. Replicating content in multiple clouds can be an expensive proposition.

What happens if the DR application resides in Cloud A, but the actual content resides in Cloud B? Is there a server somewhere handling the arbitration between the application and the content?

For the current 2020 (2021) Olympics, the Olympic Broadcast System (OBS) is putting content in the Alibaba cloud enabling broadcasters to access the feed without building and managing dedicated individual connections to all the global organizations covering the games. Now if any of the broadcasters use a different cloud, then they will need to bring the feed down from the Alibaba cloud and add their production and post to their cloud provider.

Let the Sun Shine In

Isn’t it time for there to be some form of standard that the cloud providers can adopt that allows interoperability or a set of API’s that a cloud user can apply to interconnect their content or applications without requiring an outboard server to negotiate between clouds. We can share documents across platforms, there are many applications facilitating this. We can cut and paste between applications because the applications resolve the format differences.

If one cloud service excels at storage and another at hosting, shouldn’t the user have the ability to use both seamlessly? It certainly appears that the user adoption of cloud is here and not going anywhere. Isn’t it time for the cloud providers to give their customers a little cooperation and relief and figure out how to work interoperably between clouds?