What are the origins of cloud-based IT services and delivery? The system and business development paths might be said to come from many sources, participants and movements over the years, but the two main ingredients I think are server or CPU core virtualization on the system level and the for ever developing business need for greater IT and service delivery flexibility. Also there have been two distinct development paths at play; one coming from in-house server consolidation and cost reduction using server virtualization, the other from the hosting services arena where the move from dedicated servers to virtualized private servers (one OS serving many user or services instances) to proper virtualized CPU cores (one hypervisor layer serving multiple, properly walled-in CPU virtual machines with their associated OS).
Both development paths were seeking greater IT service delivery flexibility, one for the internal IT department and it's users, the other for the hosting service provider and service provisioning & production, and both achieved much improved TCO.
Going a bit further into the in-house development path, one traditionally had IT departments using servers for single tasks, i.e. file and print, database hosting, email server, firewall, as work separation made functional sense and CPU's couldn't carry greater work loads. Beginning around 2002 with VMWare, physical servers could be virtualized, i.e. made to carry multiple work loads, depending on time of day or some basic concurrent task switching, and the server virtualisation movement or consolidation path was started once IT admins saw the server management and cost reduction benefits. Most companies with a in-house data center or server farm would have migrated to virtualized, consolidated server platform by now.
In the Internet hosting arena, or outsourced IT services arena for that matter, the hosting space evolved from shared hosting (i.e. multiple web domains on a single or load-balanced server) or dedicated servers for some high-capacity work load environments into the ASP market (application service provider) to host and offer higher margin application hosting and delivery. ASP loads were in most cases tied to core business hours, and ASP servers were left idling outside 08.00 - 17.00. Also providing dedicated servers were costly, as these servers also typically were hard at work only during specific hours during the day - business hours if the server were covering business area service utilization, 17.00-23.00 or so if the services on the server were geared towards the consumer market.
For both ASP and dedicated server hosting, server and CPU core virtualisation came in as a cost saviour or allowed hosting companies to move away from costly one server for one application or customer environments, and into virtualized work environments were work loads could be shared or shifted between fewer servers throughout the day. Also proper CPU and OS virtualisation meant greater work load control and configuration than VPS server, where one OS install and config were tasked with serving a range of use cases and applications. Server virtualisation lead to virtualized server platforms and in due time to virtualzed data centers, that allowed for easier load balancing between servers and data centers for that matter.
With both corporate in-house servers and data centers being virtualized, as well as server platforms for hosters, and the evolved mind-set for virtualized IT service delivery opportunities that comes with this, the next "natural" step seems to be or are the move towards "servers or virtual machines as a service" in the cloud, either in a private cloud delivery mode or in a public cloud delivery mode. Or a mix of the two modes in a hybrid delivery mode for cloud based IT services.
And that's the topic for the next post in this blog.
Both development paths were seeking greater IT service delivery flexibility, one for the internal IT department and it's users, the other for the hosting service provider and service provisioning & production, and both achieved much improved TCO.
Going a bit further into the in-house development path, one traditionally had IT departments using servers for single tasks, i.e. file and print, database hosting, email server, firewall, as work separation made functional sense and CPU's couldn't carry greater work loads. Beginning around 2002 with VMWare, physical servers could be virtualized, i.e. made to carry multiple work loads, depending on time of day or some basic concurrent task switching, and the server virtualisation movement or consolidation path was started once IT admins saw the server management and cost reduction benefits. Most companies with a in-house data center or server farm would have migrated to virtualized, consolidated server platform by now.
In the Internet hosting arena, or outsourced IT services arena for that matter, the hosting space evolved from shared hosting (i.e. multiple web domains on a single or load-balanced server) or dedicated servers for some high-capacity work load environments into the ASP market (application service provider) to host and offer higher margin application hosting and delivery. ASP loads were in most cases tied to core business hours, and ASP servers were left idling outside 08.00 - 17.00. Also providing dedicated servers were costly, as these servers also typically were hard at work only during specific hours during the day - business hours if the server were covering business area service utilization, 17.00-23.00 or so if the services on the server were geared towards the consumer market.
For both ASP and dedicated server hosting, server and CPU core virtualisation came in as a cost saviour or allowed hosting companies to move away from costly one server for one application or customer environments, and into virtualized work environments were work loads could be shared or shifted between fewer servers throughout the day. Also proper CPU and OS virtualisation meant greater work load control and configuration than VPS server, where one OS install and config were tasked with serving a range of use cases and applications. Server virtualisation lead to virtualized server platforms and in due time to virtualzed data centers, that allowed for easier load balancing between servers and data centers for that matter.
With both corporate in-house servers and data centers being virtualized, as well as server platforms for hosters, and the evolved mind-set for virtualized IT service delivery opportunities that comes with this, the next "natural" step seems to be or are the move towards "servers or virtual machines as a service" in the cloud, either in a private cloud delivery mode or in a public cloud delivery mode. Or a mix of the two modes in a hybrid delivery mode for cloud based IT services.
And that's the topic for the next post in this blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment