Aug 09
24

Patterns for Cloud Computing

4 Comments

Over the past few months I’ve been working with many customers and internal groups to try and determine whether there is a common set of patterns for cloud computing.  As you’ve probably read, many people are claiming to do cloud computing, so my goal has been to explore the types of applications that people are running in the cloud, and whether these applications can be categorized in any way.

The result of this work is a presentation called Patterns for Cloud Computing, which I delivered at our internal conference (TechReady) last month.  Due to many people asking for it however, I’ve now created and uploaded a public version on SlideShare, which you can find here.

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The presentation first covers a definition of cloud computing (as I believe this is where many people first struggle when trying to understand the space), and continues by exploring five usage patterns for cloud computing.  The patterns fall into the following categories:

Using the Cloud for Scale:  How are people using cloud computing to achieve scale using provisioned machines in the cloud vs. physical machines on-premise?

Using the Cloud for Multi-Tenancy:  How are people using the cloud to create multi-tenant applications, serving thousands of customers using the same code base?

Using the Cloud for Compute:  How are people using the cloud to solve computationally intensive problems across a number of machines?

Using the Cloud for Storage:  How are people using the cloud to store massive amounts of data, in a way that is “infinitely” scalable?

Using the Cloud for Communications:  How are people using the cloud to make peer-to-peer and asynchronous communications easier?

These patterns represent some early thinking and research, but my hope is that they make it easier for people to better understand a definition of cloud computing, together with some of the applications that make sense today.

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Posted in Architecture Cloud Computing Events by Simon 4 Comments

4 Responses to "Patterns for Cloud Computing"

  • Technology Services says:
    August 26, 2009 at 10:52 am

    I think using cloud for storage and also for communication will get more hype than others… Cloud computing when considered similar to SAAS has possibilities ,but it really needs good promotion

  • http:// says:
    August 28, 2009 at 12:18 pm

    Cloud for communications and cloud for single sign on and this concept of identity metasystem are the biggest wins.
    I think the compute is being underestimated as well.
    enabling a new set of functionality that leverages your existing on premise assets is low cost of entry and will enable things that were not financially or architecturally “possible” before.

    Anything is possible of course but we live in a world of constraints… time to market, budget, expertise, etc. we still have constraints but this technology helps us do more than we would have been able to.

    but there could be radical changes in the way we compute moving forward because if everyone creating applications is more free financially and architecturally

    we could see some type of web30 coming soon.

    some of these things include.. the EnergyNet concept from Juval Lowy and others like MEBAs multi enterprise business applications.

  • http:// says:
    October 1, 2009 at 11:57 pm

    That slide presentation looked great. What application did you use to create the whiteboard sketches?

  • http:// says:
    October 2, 2009 at 8:39 am

    @ENCN: It was actually all done using PowerPoint. The background was a photograph of a real whiteboard, and I found a good “whiteboard-looking” font from a studio that specializes in Manga comics.

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