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Monthly Archives: June 2012
Busting the five myths of cloud computing
HP argues that virtualization is not the only step to do cloud, cloud is also for business critical applications, private cloud is not that secure, public cloud is not the cheapest and there are more than one way of doing cloud, HP in its new whitepaper tries to shed light on a few myths, which IT fraternity believes to be true. Let us see what they are:
Myth one: the public cloud is the most inexpensive way to procure IT services
HP agrees ‘public cloud is a relatively inexpensive “pay-as-you-use” model’, and that the starting price for standard on-demand instances with the Amazon EC2 Web service is less than a dime per hour based on system size, operating system, and locale. However, delivery from the public cloud is not always the cheapest than that delivered by internal IT. ‘For resources that are needed constantly, enterprises can actually reduce costs by leveraging other cloud models, such as shared resources delivered via a private cloud. In cases like this, the private cloud actually is more cost-efficient than even the pay-as-you-use public cloud model,” says the whitepaper.
Myth two: baby steps in virtualization are the only way to reach the cloud
Whereas, HP says that virtualization and cloud are mutually exclusive, and that ‘virtualized infrastructure is a strong catalyst for the next step’, however, it is just one of the ways, or ‘just – a step’, to begin. Similar to virtualization, even a private cloud brings tremendous benefits such as reducing IT complexity, significantly lowering IT costs, and enabling a more flexible and agile service delivery. ‘Even private cloud automates the underlying provisioning of infrastructure and applications and adds a convenient way for end users to request IT services. A private cloud based on shared pools of resources—resources that can be automatically tapped to meet business needs—can help IT keep up. The private cloud allows IT managers to have complete control over available assets, while adhering to the security standards required both within the cloud and in the data center. The cloud provides the agility needed to automate workflows and reduce human involvement in time-consuming but necessary tasks such as the provisioning of applications.”
Myth three: critical applications do not belong in the cloud
HP points out ‘it is one thing to relegate a few servers running test and development jobs to a cloud-based infrastructure. But delivering business applications quickly and efficiently continues to be the most important charter for IT organizations.’ Studies such as a recent one by Forbes show that IT executives are under extreme pressure to:
- Cut infrastructure costs
- Adjust their service levels to meet changing needs
- Deliver applications with greater speed
IT professionals are interested in cloud computing to help them address all three of these requirements. And the same applies to their business critical applications.
Myth four: all cloud security requirements are created equally
The use of a public cloud service can provide relief from investments in hardware and software, as you pay for service delivery instead. HP points out that many IT executives are unwilling to create a system where their data resides outside of their control. Fearful of the constant growth in attack methodologies, IT executives believe that the private cloud is the answer because it keeps the cloud infrastructure on the premises, inside company firewalls, and under the direct control of the IT group. However, the whitepaper notes that private cloud model penetrable as ‘vulnerabilities exist with a connection to the Internet. There also remains the threat of insider attacks and data theft.’
Myth five: there is only one way to do cloud computing
There are several, infact, such as public and private and hybrid cloud. ‘Hybrid cloud is composed of two or more clouds (private, community, or public). These clouds remain unique entities, but they are bound together by standardized technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting for load-balancing between clouds),’ says the whitepaper.
Source: CIOL Bureau
A Startup Hopes to Help Computers Understand Web Pages
Diffbot aims to make it easier for apps to read Web pages the way humans do – Diffbot’s visual learning technology can identify the different items that make up Web pages, like the one shown here.
No matter what language you speak, when you look at a Web page, you can get a good idea of the purpose of the different elements on it—whether they’re images, videos, text, music, or ads. It’s not so easy for machines to do the same, though. That’s where Diffbot hopes to make a difference. The startup, based in Palo Alto, California, offers application programming interfaces that make it possible for machines to “read” the various objects that make up Web pages. This could enable a publisher to repurpose the contents of pages for a mobile app, or help a startup build a price-comparison site. The company’s efforts come at a time when some tech titans are also working to add more structure to the vast amount of data on the Web. Google, for example, recently unveiled the Knowledge Graph, an effort to identify the meaning of search queries and return relevant results, rather than simply matching the text of a query with Web pages that include the same words. But these efforts usually rely on people to help by tagging Web content to infer meaning. John Davi, Diffbot’s vice president of product, says that at its heart, the company is about taking the visual learning technology that propels self-driving cars forward on a road and applying it to Web pages.
The idea, which CEO and founder Mike Tung hatched several years ago while he was a graduate student at Stanford, has hummed along since last year. That’s when Diffbot rolled out an API capable of analyzing two types of Web pages on the basis of the URL. On article pages, Diffbot can pick out headlines, the text of articles, pictures, and tags; and on home pages, it can determine basic layout elements like headlines pictures, links to articles, and ads. By now, several thousand programmers are using it to analyze over 100 million URLs each month, Tung says. There are many more types of Web pages out there, though. The company believes there are roughly 18 main types, ranging from product and job pages to photo galleries. With a $2 million round of funding announced Thursday—its first following an earlier round of seed funding—the company plans to get moving on the 16 other types. This will involve determining what makes up pages of these types—photos, prices, and so on—and using that information to build algorithms that can process unfamiliar pages.
While Diffbot offers its API to customers for free, it charges for high levels of usage. Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of file-sharing site YouSendIt and an investor in and advisor to Diffbot, says that while the company isn’t currently profitable, it could be without too much trouble. “They’re solving some here-and-now problems that customers are willing to pay for,” says Garlinghouse. Currently, a number of Diffbot users are media companies, including Garlinghouse’s previous employer, AOL (Diffbot powers the content aggregation behind AOL’s tablet magazine, Editions). As Davi, of Diffbot, points out, media companies often purchase publications whose online content has been created with a different content management system. Diffbot’s API can ease the process of consolidating content, he says. As the company makes it possible to analyze pages of additional types, its founders hope to see Diffbot used for things like product price comparison, photo and recipe aggregation, and more. Tung says, “It’s going to be really exciting to see what people build.”
Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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