One of the greatest moments a cloud evangelist indulges in occurs at that point a listener experiences an intuitive leap of understanding following your explanation of cloud computing. No greater joy and intrinsic sense of accomplishment.
Government IT managers, particularly those in developing countries, view information and communications technology (ICT) as almost a "black" art. Unlike the US, Europe, Korea, Japan, or other countries where Internet and network-enabled everything has diffused itself into the core of Generation "Y-ers," Millennials, and Gen "Z-ers." The black art gives IT managers in some legacy organizations the power they need to control the efforts of people and groups needing support, as their limited understanding of ICT still sets them slightly above the abilities of their peers.
But, when the "users" suddenly have that right brain flash of comprehension in a complex topic such as cloud computing, the barrier of traditional IT control suddenly becomes a barrier which must be explained and justified. Suddenly everybody from the CFO down to supervisors can become "virtual" data center operators – at the touch of a keyboard. Suddenly cloud computing and ICT becomes a standard tool for work – a utility.
The Domain Name System (DNS) gives a human interface to the very complicated Internet numbering and addressing system. DNS allows you to type www.yahoo.com , rather than the Internet address 69.147.114.224, or even worse, one of the new Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) addresses that might look like 2001:db8:1f70::999:de8:7648:6e8.
Paul Mockapetris, founder of DNS and email, addressed the problem of providing DNS services in a virtual environment during a speech at Interop Las Vegas 2009. While virtualizing DNS in a cloud might appear to be a daunting task, Mr. Mockapetris believes that "it won't take too long for cloud domain naming to become standardized, because after all everthing will still run under TCP/IP - the standard Internet protocol."
DNS becomes tricky in a cloud environment, as domain naming is bound to a specific user or company. www.yahoo.com cannot be used by Google or Microsoft, as it is owned by Yahoo. The same goes for the cryptic IP addresses - as they are provisioned to a specific user.
On the Cloud Computing mailing list supported by Google Groups, a topic came up that is actually quite interesting.
One member asked the question, "if we are going to potentially have a major shift in the number and type of IT jobs over the next 3~5 years, resulting in a large number of IT-related layoffs, are we actually building a new generation of cyber-terrorists?"
Guess the paraphrase of this question could be, "could a generation of scorned computer geeks be the next generation of terrorist?"
What do you do when your IT storage and processing growth requirement demands a tremendous increase in servers and data center space, but your IT budget is shrinking? What do you do when disaster recovery requirements demand geographic backups with near zero time recovery point and recovery time objectives?
Ask Bert Armijo at 3tera. 3tera is a young, rapidly growing company based in Aliso Viejo, specializing in cloud computing - specifically the provisioning of cloud computing.
At the last CTC meeting (22 Jan) Bert gave a great presentation on the future of data processing as we know it. While talking with the audience on a very human level, he was actually passing a level of complex knowledge to the audience that left everybody wondering what had hit them. And burning many, many brain cells trying to wrap their minds round the implications of computing in the "cloud."
