Increasing Functional Specificity over Increasingly Commoditized Hardware - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 2

CasS, IaaS, SaaS, PaaS, MaaS

XaaS customer XaaS customer

Utility computing

Grid computing

Cluster computing

Super computing

FIGURE 1.1
Evolution of computing services.

of data—whirring away in large, dark, refrigerated data centers. People at
Google call this network the cloud .
One challenge of programming at Google is to leverage the cloud—to
push it to do things that would overwhelm other machines and networks.
For example, a partnership with IBM aims to plug universities around the
world into Google-like computing clouds. Google engineers teach the cloud
new tricks as it grows in size and sophistication—in 2007, they added four
new data centers, at an average cost of $600 million a piece. Importantly,
in building this cloud, Google is poised to take a new role in the computer
industry. Google's cloud is a network of hundreds of thousands—by some
estimates 1 million—of cheap servers, each storing huge amounts of data, to
make searches faster. Unlike its predecessor, the supercomputer, Google's
system never ages—as individual computers die, they are replaced individu-
ally with newer, faster boxes. This means the cloud regenerates as it grows,
almost like a living thing.
As the concept of computing clouds spreads, it expands Google's footprint
way beyond search, media, and advertising, and Google could become, in
effect, the world's primary computer. No corporate computing system can
match the efficiency, speed, and flexibility of resources of Google's cloud. It is
estimated that Google can carry out a computing task for one-tenth of what it
costs a typical company. Big data centers linked to form a cloud encapsulate
the full disruptive potential of utility computing. If people and businesses
can rely on central stations to fulfill all (or most) of their computing needs,
they will be able to drastically reduce their expenditure on their own hard-
ware and software—revenue that currently goes to Microsoft and the other
tech giants.
Similarly, Amazon has opened up its own networks of computers to pay-
ing customers, initiating new users to cloud computing. Significantly, as the
volumes of data from business and scientific research expand, computing