Doximex.Com: Sneaking into the Cloud

Monday, August 3, 2009

Sneaking into the Cloud

We had our first Cloud Computing Conference last Saturday, co-hosted by the Twitter Community in Vietnam and Cloud.vn, a new initiative from Vinapo that hopefully could bring cloud computing to the average Joe (Joe? Eh?)

For those of you who didn’t get the chance to participate in this well-attended and highly anticipated event, here are the key takeaways:

By definition: Cloud computing is the equivalence of SaaS and Utilities Computing.

Vietnamese academic institutions are moving away from Grid Computing and investing resources in Cloud Computing. Cloud Computing is more favorable because it’s not only attractive to the academia but also the business dudes who can leverage Cloud Computing into their advantage.

Cloud Computing is a huge challenge for local universities as it requires a great deal of human and capital resources. But the possibility is there.

IBM is working with local universities and companies to promote Cloud Computing. They’re launching a new product called CloudBust, which brings Cloud Computing to a single server that companies can manage themselves.

Cloud Computing = Infrastructure + Platform + Application service provision. IBM thinks it’s better for local companies to provide the first two services and leaves the latter for them to take care of. Which makes sense in the short term.

Cloud.vn, a new start-up from Vinapo is trying to build a Google-AppEngine-like Cloud Computing service. They humbly start by targeting at individual developers and SME who want to take a look at Cloud Computing is. However, their “data center” is cheap rented servers that are provided by VDC, one of Vietnam’s major ISPs.

The conference has come under fire, especially from an established security researcher (@thaidn). In his entry he stated that the prospect of having a local Cloud Computing service, in terms of Infrastructure, is far-fetching. Because it takes thousands of PhDs and years of experience of building data centers, and of course, the qualified scale as that of Amazon, Google, and Micrsoft, to provide a quality Cloud Computing service.

Only fools don’t know this. And only fools who know this but still want to do it. But here’s a better reality. They should still do it. The worst scenario is they fail. Who cares? How many of us here have had success with a start-up?

And I’m quite convinced by @dshupp and @shassinger that someone needs to do it eventually. Because it might be tempting to use IBM, or someone else, as an Infrastructure service provider, but in the longer run Vietnam needs to be standing on its own feet.

Yes, Cloud.vn, as of this writing, needs a huge list of things to be done. Their server got hacked by one line of Python code. They need to work on their Infrastructure eventually. They need to enhance their service offerings. etc.

The better part? They can learn from these mistakes. And exposure like this is in fact a big benefit to them. Who’s giving away the cookies?

You can always come here and give me a thousand reasons why we shouldn’t do this and that because it’s irrational. But unfortunately that’s the nature of human beings.

I wrote this because Tyler wanted to write this. Wink