Cloud Computing: Pros and Cons of a Revolution

The use of cloud computing is a fact in modern computing, but do we really know the “cloud” that well? In this review, we’ll be discussing the good points of this architecture (and therefore understand why it is so popular) but also several disadvantages. Our study will be mainly based on two research papers.

The first one, The Case for Cloud Computing was written by Robert L. Grossman, who is a teacher at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a member of the Open Data Group, and published by the IEEE Computer Society in 2009. The main purpose of this paper is to explain what is Cloud Computing, to point out that there are two types of clouds and to bring forth the advantages of a Cloud based architecture.

The second one, Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing was written by Michael Armbrust et al and which was published at the University of California at Berkeley in 2009. Besides explaining what is a cloud and its inherent advantages, this paper emphasizes on possible limitations of the cloud architecture.

We have all heard the term “Cloud Computing” one day or another but most people have only a loose idea of what it’s really about. You could find a lot of different definitions for a cloud, as a sum up we could say that Cloud Computing refers to two specific things: the applications delivered as services over the Internet (Amazon S3, Google WebApp) and the hardware in the datacenters that provide those services.  There are a lot of advantages of using a cloud : the illusion of infinite resources available whenever the user want, companies can start small and increase resources only when needed, the ability to pay for use on a short-term basis (and sometimes it’s way cheaper than a standard server farm [3] )…[1]

But the Cloud Computing is not a miracle cure and there are some drawbacks that we need to take into account. Data security and confidentiality is a very important topic nowadays, service stability is also a big issue; Cloud Computing seems to be vulnerable to several types of attacks, especially if the workload controller (MapReduce for example) is not able to bear a DOS attack [4]. Another issues are bugs in large-scale distributed systems, this is one of the biggest challenge in Cloud Computing e.g. to remove software/systems software errors in a very large scale [2]. Another obstacle is the software licensing [2], a lot of software licenses restrict the number of computers on which the software can run therefore it’s not adapted at all to the pay-as-you-go scheme commonly found in clouds [2] and software company are pretty reluctant to create specifically designed software for clouds as it interferes with the quarterly sales tracking used to measure effectiveness, which is based on one-time purchase [2].  One more obstacle is the data lock-in which comes from a lack of standardization in the world of Cloud Computing, the APIs for Cloud Computing are still essentially proprietary so the customers can’t easily extract their data or worst cannot even recover them [5].

Although cloud computing has many advantages that explain why services such Amazon S3 are so popular a lot of issues and concerns are also raised when we look further. The main problems are confidentiality and accessibility of data but also software licensing, we need to change the way we consider computing in order to overcome those problems (for example stop seeing computers mainly as hardware and start considering it like a set of services).

References:

[1] Robert L. Grossman, “The Case for Cloud Computing”, IEEE Computer Society, 2009.

[2] Michael Armburst et al, “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing”, University of California at Berkeley, 2009.

[3] J. Hamilton, “Cost of Power in Large Scale Data Centers”, 2008, available from http://perspectives.mvdirona.com .

[4] D. Hyuk Woo and H.H. Lee, “Analyzing performance vulnerability due to resource denial of service attack on chip multiprocessors”, Workshop on Chip Multiprocessor Memory Systems and Interconnects, 2007.

[5] J. Brodkin, “Loss of customer data spurs closure of online storage service ‘The Linkup’”, Network World, 2008.

Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

With the shift to digital modes of storage (nowadays everyone has a flash drive, know how to burn a CD...), "have we forgotten how to forget ?" This is the main concern of Viktor Mayer-Schönberger who has written a book: Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. For most human history, every little thing we did was at a point forgotten, and from a social point of view it was a good thing; everyone has done stupid things that needed to be forgotten...Digital world has eliminated that forgiveness. Google caches copies of our blog postings (even this one !), social-networking (e.g. Facebook) sites archives all of our photos, messages... It's literally harder to erase information than to retrieve it. Why this is a problem ? According to the author, in addition with piling up unwanted and out of date informations the social implications are tremendous and everything thing we post could turn into a trap for a future career...(the author gives some examples in this video)

So the point is made: there is a true problem, but what are the solutions, what could be done in a world that relies on digital data ? According to Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, people need to stop designing tools that automatically store everything instead we need to design tools that allow people to put "expiration date" on the data entered. The author gives an example with drop.io, this service is an on-line private sharing but what makes unique is when you're uploading a file it asks you to put an expiration date on it. With this solution the file is automatically deleted and the data on it...forgotten.

In my own opinion, I am more concerned about what social networking sites and web crawling sites want to do with those informations...In some case it's rather clear, for example with gMail Google displays ads according to the contents of your mail but what about social networking sites what are they gonna do with those infos (and by infos I mean our private life...). But this problem doesn't exist for everyone, in fact the existence of the problem in one's mind is conditioned on our relation with the digital tools. During last class we took a quick survey, the question was rather straight-forward "Is the standard default of remembering on the Internet a problem ?" and the results: 18 for yes and 12 for no, the class was nearly cut in half on this topic. Now it could be interesting to take a survey on a wider population and to study the results according to the age of the participants as kids tends to use a lot social networking.