The Hails and Fails of Cloud Computing in 2012

The year 2012 has certainly been a prolific year for enterprise and cloud computing. With humungous raise in production and revenue, the cloud businesses is really getting itself into its pace which suggests that in 2013, this technology is all set to showcase the tech world its real strength. Even analysts and researchers have predicted that over the next two years, the cloud platform will see a massive doubling in its revenue.

Coming back to 2012, the year not only had to recite tales of success, but also a lot to say on the setbacks. For the past couple of months, we really saw some of the weaknesses in cloud computing which really has caused a bit of concern in the minds of new comers who are willing to shift their applications to the cloud.

With that in mind, as compiled by informationweek, here are some of the hails and fails of cloud computing in 2012.

FAIL #1: Outage Plagues Amazon and Others

The worst thing that can happen to a service is outage. When big companies starts betting their businesses on cloud, and when a sudden outage happens, the end result is total havoc. The same happened to Amazon Web Services in April 2012. The AW Service was the front runners in cloud services and suffered an unplanned outage in the month of April. Amazon has blamed the disruption on one of its data centers that unexpectedly went down.

On June 29^th Amazon again faced another outage, this time due to violent electrical storms. The storm completely incapacitated one of its data centers. Amazon didn't say why the battery and generator backup systems of a supposedly highly available cloud didn't keep services running. The outage caused havoc across some of their important customers like Salesforce.com's developer cloud Heroku, Netflix, and social networking firms Instagram and Pinterest. On October 22^nd, Amazon’s Elastic Block Storage services were disrupted for a few hours. This made some companies impossible to update and retrieve data into their websites.

FAIL #2: Virtual Machine Spying Gets More Real

Although still a theory, this year it has been proved that the virtual spying technology is not far away. Even one of the researchers published a mind blowing example on how virtual machine can be used to spy on another one within the same server. This really has created confusion across enterprises, as the cloud relies heavily on the multi-tenant, virtual server host, where one physical server is used by multiple companies and customers.

FAIL #3: Uncertainty Over Cloud Pricing

Another setback for cloud computing is the issues over its pricing. One really cannot make out what the exact format of the billing system, as some of the bill even contains workload charges by the marketing department. It’s pretty hard to relate the workload of a team with the charges of the bill.

The best way is to take time, sit and compare each and every billing scale of every single cloud services available. But this certainly can take hours of work as people have to isolate the information and then arrange them into a spreadsheet.

The confusion doesn’t end up there, as different vendors come with different configurations and definitions about their virtual CPUs. The major vendors do small, medium and large configurations, with several extra-large types thrown in the mix. But they each define the combination of memory, CPU and storage a little differently, making direct comparison difficult.

HAIL #1: Customers have More Options from Which to Choose

The year started with Amazon and Rackspace as the lone frontrunners in the cloud space. But as the days passed, more new service providers joined the race, making the cloud arena more and more interesting. At present, the cloud space is so wide that customers have handful of options to choose from.

For instance take the case of SoftLayer Technologies. The company recently added 30,000 servers to its already 70,000 for providing better IaaS offering. Smaller companies have now added their arsenal with smarter technologies because of their strong ties with bigger companies. Companies like Hosting.com, Bluelock and Peak 10 are just some of the major players that need to be mentioned from the broader list.

HAIL #2: Price Wars Bring Down Cloud Storage Costs

This truly was one of the best news of 2012. The funny part was that it took over 9 months for companies to cut down their cloud costs. The trend all started when Amazon suddenly announced that they have bought down their Simple Storage (S3) prices by 24 percent to 27 percent. The very next things got heated up as Google popped out of nowhere, announcing a cut on their storage price by 20 percent. This was the biggest drop in cloud storage services since the services were created.

HAIL #3: At Last Telecom comes With a Reliable Backup

A cloud data center acting as a backup facility for another- a true question, but unanswered for many years. But the year 2012 has shed some much needed light into this question.

The advantage for one such infrastructure is simple. At times of an outage, the backup data centers can act as the primary one and help companies to run their businesses successfully. But the biggest problem is its execution, which is pretty hard. Duplicate systems must be stored in each location. And at the moment of crisis, it's impossible to transfer all the data needed by the system in a few minutes. So preparations need to be made. Data must be replicated to the backup site on an ongoing basis, so in the advent of a disaster, only a few days or few hours of data must follow the migration to the backup site.

Now coming back to 2012, the year also saw the launch of cloud services from data centers owned by telecom providers. One such example is from Savvis, owned by CenturyLink, the third largest U.S. telecom supplier, who united its cloud data centers together with CenturyLink private lines.

HAIL #4: More Cloud Server Types Available

2012 was a year where the cloud world saw servers of different types and of different storage sizes. Amazon led the way in setting the pace of types of virtual servers. It all started with Amazon introducing micro, small, medium and large sized virtual servers. This was followed by extra-large and double extra-large cloud servers. Later, servers that featured high-memory extra-large, double extra-large, and quadruple extra-large were introduced. Concentrated CPUs arrived in the form of high-CPU medium and high-CPU extra-large. Cluster instances, graphics processing unit instances, and high I/O instances round out the list.