In this MVA track, we’ll introduce the essential concepts of cloud computing, and what it means today.

We’ll also explain different approaches to the cloud and various implementations and look at the three main kinds of cloud provision: Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service and Software as a Service.

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The term ‘Cloud computing’ is one of the most widely used in the IT industry today. To some, it’s a revolution in the way IT services are delivered. To others, it’s just marketing-speak. The reality is probably somewhere in between.

It’s certainly true that a range of significant developments are taking place. The most crucial is the separation of software from dedicated hardware, allowing more efficient resource sharing and flexible workload balancing.

New management capabilities have also emerged which allow assisted or automated processes that enable rapid responses to be made to requests for service setup changes.

In addition, the Cloud also means that mobile or remote workers can get at their applications and data more easily.

What it comes down to is a whole set of capabilities and features that did not really exist a few short years ago that allow a flexible and dynamic set of IT services to be built – whether internally or externally.

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Few organisations, even smaller ones, have the luxury of wiping the slate clean and starting again with their IT. New ideas and methods generally build on existing IT infrastructure.

So the question is less about considering a ‘move to the Cloud’, and more about extending your IT services to include the Cloud.

Most IT requirements today are met through the fixed infrastructure approach, shown in the bottom left-hand corner of this slide.

Hardware and software are tightly coupled, even if virtualisation has consolidated the hardware.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this model. Fixed and predictable requirements can also be met with a traditional hosting model.

It’s in the top two quadrants that new options are beginning to emerge.

Advanced virtualisation and ‘private cloud’ technologies enable more flexible IT provisioning. At an infrastructure level, server resources are managed as a single virtual resource, or ‘cloud’, that can provide compute power on demand. The idea is that applications are decoupled from individual servers, so each workload receives just the amount of resources it needs.

Private clouds are also a stepping-stone to the on-demand hosting model known as the public cloud. This term encompasses a huge array of capabilities and services, but the general rule is that these resources are available from a third-party provider, where the infrastructure or services are shared between different customers rather than being dedicated.

Perhaps most importantly, these different approaches are not mutually exclusive. For many, a hybrid approach is often the most appropriate.

In addition, public cloud can sometimes provide dedicated infrastructure for a premium, allowing companies to run a private cloud setup within the infrastructure of a public cloud. And traditional hosting providers are starting to offer more dynamic services for both private and public cloud services.

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Making any kind of cloud solution work requires seamless management that makes hardware, communications, storage, operating systems, middleware and applications all perform as one coherent whole.

Without this management, those elements are like an orchestra left to its own devices. It may be able to pull off a performance that’s recognisable as the intended piece, but often with different sections following different interpretations and rhythms.

The result is an un-coordinated mess that is painful on the ears. This changes when a conductor arrives and stamps control over the hundreds of individual elements and tens of groups that make up the orchestra.

It is this orchestration of management that is the key to cloud.

The aptly named System Center Orchestrator 2012 is a management toolset that is able to look across all the different elements that make up a cloud service. It can bring them all together, either directly or through integrating with other management tools to enable operational and configuration control.

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Cloud services offer some interesting short term opportunities. Here, we outline some of the main types of workload patterns, and the different scenarios for each.

Periodic workloads are when applications are mostly idle but peak from time to time. They are typically batch oriented – for example, billing and payroll – but can be online – for example, periodic administration activity.

Bursty workloads occur with applications that create a continuous load, but which also fluctuate significantly. The most common examples are consumer-facing web applications.

Continual expansion is a workload whose general path is continually upwards. That means new capacity is added frequently, with an impact on operations, optimisation and architecture. Practical considerations, such as procurement and power, can often limit this.

In addition, there are also a number of different usage scenarios where the use of cloud services can enhance your IT capabilities:

For lightweight workloads where workgroup applications only occasionally ‘tickle’ the server they sit on, on-demand cloud hosting is an alternative to traditional virtualisation for consolidating these.

It is also a good option for compute-intensive workloads, where number crunching applications can benefit from parallel processing. Demand is often ad hoc or periodic, making on-site special equipment a hard cost to justify.

Cloud services are particularly useful in development and testing where there are transient requirements for target environments as part of the application build/test/release cycle.

Finally, cloud also comes into its own on limited lifetime special projects that are resource heavy but limited in duration. Cloud can help here by avoiding leftover assets or software after the project has finished.

On-demand hosting can often be trialled in cases like these in a controlled way, without having to worry about the wholesale movement of a significant part of your systems landscape.

Development and testing, for example, represents a particularly low-risk place to start if there are cultural and/or practical concerns about going down the hosted services route.

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We can generally classify the cloud into three main service types.

The first is Infrastructure as a Service.

Infrastructure as a Service provides hardware-like storage or networking that’s controlled by the supplier. However the end user maintains control of the operating system and applications installed within.

This system usually includes a metered-by-use cost model and enables the end user to expand/contract their use of the infrastructure as needed, usually via self-service portals.

Examples of this include internet hosting providers, private clouds managed by IT internally as a service, and the Microsoft Azure Service with the virtual machine role.

Infrastructure as a Service means you can buy access to a bunch of servers and storage, together with the connectivity needed to tie it all together.

This is almost always a set of virtual resources that are shared among many, but appear as though they are real and dedicated.

These resources are managed by the service provider to keep them available and reliable, but it is usually down to the customer to license, install and manage the operating systems, middleware and applications that run on them.

In some cases, Infrastructure as a Service vendors are starting to offer “pre-packaged” servers that have commonly-used licences and software already installed to make it easier and more predictable to set up services.

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Microsoft has an integrated stack of products that together provide the essential elements to providing Infrastructure as a Service across automation, self-service, management, virtualisation and identity.

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Platform as a Service is a model for delivering complete development platforms as a cloud service.

Platform as a Service offerings facilitate development, testing, deployment and ongoing maintenance of applications without the cost of buying the underlying infrastructure and software environments.

Platform as a Service is best thought of as a hosted application runtime environment.

Applications are developed for the run-time, and then loaded up and executed within this environment, while the end user, or customer, sees none of the underlying operating systems, middleware, servers, networking or storage.

This means that end users don’t have to worry about architecting, installing, maintaining or optimising the application environment. Instead, they just load their application and pay for the service they need.

Some Platform as a Service environments are compatible and you can shop around between providers for the best price or service. However, some providers demand a degree of lock-in that makes migrating to a new provider more difficult.

This is well worth keeping in mind when it comes to choosing how flexible you need the service provider selection to be.

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The Microsoft Platform as a Service product / service offering includes:

• Windows Azure for service hosting, scalable storage and automated service management

• Microsoft SQL Services for infrastructure data storage and reporting

• Microsoft .NET Services for access control, workflow and messaging

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SharePoint Services that extend the capabilities of these platforms for business content

The Azure Services Platform is built on the Windows Azure foundational layer. Windows Azure is a 64-bit operating system in the cloud. It provides service hosting, service management, scalable storage and a development environment for the Azure Services Platform. The Azure Service Platform includes: SQL Services and .NET Services, Live Services, SharePoint and Dynamics CRM services.

The aim is to provide a comprehensive services platform to help organisations take advantage of cloud computing and services in a cohesive and consistent platform – just as we did with .NET. It’s also a comprehensive set of approachable services that support the development and execution of scalable applications.

To meet that aim, Microsoft’s Services Platform consists of three distinct layers of services. At the base level, we provide a set of foundation services including the data centre and infrastructure as well as compute, basic storage and management services.

The middle layer consists of building block services. Think of these as programmable components that typically expose web services that can be consumed from your own applications. Some of these building block services are designed more for business application scenarios. Others are designed more for personal or consumer-centric scenarios. But these services will work together. Some of the building block services include relational database services, workflow that provides a runtime execution environment for declarative workflows, and an Identity Service to manage access control.

The final, top layer consists of finished services. Finished services are solutions and services that users would touch. They typically provide specialised or domain-specific functionality. For example, you could think of CRM Online as a finished service. CRM Online also exposes web services that can be invoked by other applications to integrate with CRM Online. Other examples of finished services include SharePoint Online and Office Live.

This layered approach is similar to the layered programming models that exist on Windows today, from the Win32 layer to managed code, and then higher-level applications such as Microsoft Office that expose their own programming models. It’s important to understand that

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you can build applications that target any of these layers in the services platform.

Finally, the services platform is an extension of the .NET Programming Model. For developers this means that you will be able to apply existing skills with .NET and Visual Studio.

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There are two main types of software as a service offering:

The first is utility style software as a service. This means horizontal hosted applications, for example email, content management and other productivity and communication tools with minimal functional configuration and integration work. Limited function CRM type application services can also be included here.

The second is complex software as a service. These are hosted services around ERP, full-scope CRM and other business applications that generally require significant functional configuration and/or integration work to get up and running in a specific customer environment.

Software as a service is generally composed of a complete set of application services that are subscribed to with no additional application development and deployment. The customer sees nothing of the infrastructure stack behind the software – it is presented to them and it ‘just works’.

However, this means that the reliability and service quality of the provider are completely out of the hands of the customer, so appropriate due diligence is required to ensure the required service can be delivered.

One of the popular misconceptions is that software as a service has to be only about cloud applications. In reality, it is the enabling software that’s provided as a service – through web interfaces or apps, or else through local applications that can connect to the cloud-based software.

Most companies prefer a balanced approach, with local applications interacting with cloud services where reliability issues like offline working or intermittent network interruptions are a concern.

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Microsoft has developed a range of business applications that run in the cloud as a service, including Office 365 for everyday word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and email together with document sharing and also voice and video conferencing and text based messaging.

There are also line of business applications such as Dynamics CRM Online for customer management, and Intune for PC management in the cloud.

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As with all things IT, the right cloud choice comes down to business requirements and needs. It means balancing them with various factors such as cost, responsiveness, capability, efficiency and flexibility.

Going down a software as a service route removes many management headaches, but can lock you into a particular vendor’s own infrastructure and feature roadmap, with migration to another provider often a difficulty.

Platform as a service offers many of the benefits of software as a service, particularly managing and provisioning infrastructure with the added bonus that you decide what software to run. This could be commercial off the shelf (COTS) applications or in-house applications, but it means that the software can be tailored to the needs of your business, not what the hosting company wants to develop or run.

Infrastructure as a service gives the most flexibility, while removing a lot of the operational headaches that companies have maintaining highly reliable networks – which for many companies is not a core area of competence. It still involves a lot of internal expertise, processes and products to make it work, but it allows specific configurations of operating system, middleware and applications to be built.

As before, a blend of these in practice is most likely, with hybrid IT services covering all three.

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