Let’s recap my original environment and requirements:

• Microsoft Office (Word, Excel & Powerpoint)
• JungleDisk Cloud Storage (Virtual File Server)
• Access and work on my documents from any device

Over the past few months I have slowly migrated across to a Mac platform from a PC, in part due to my laptop dying and having taken the decision to go back to a Mac which is a more solid platform. I migrated my development suites to Mac versions or alternatives and thought long and hard about what to do about Microsoft Office.

Eventually, I decided to go with iWorks (Numbers, Pages & Keynote) for the following reasons:

• I don’t need the full power of MS Office
• I can read MS Office documents in their iWork equivalents
• I can easily share iWork documents through iWork.com
• I can export files to MS Office formats if needed, or send PDFs

Slowly, I have been porting documents, letters and spreadsheets across to iWork as needed and found the process relatively easy. However, the access issue still remained from the iPad. I mentioned this to another aficionado and he said that it was easy to do from iDisk, which is part of the MobileMe suite of features. It is a shame I can’t use my own JungleDisk Cloud Storage service, but at least I can use a Cloud Storage service to save and access my files from any device.

I set up an account, and aside from the 10Gb disk space, also benefited from having all my contacts and appointments synchronised and backed up across my Apple devices, and also the ability to kill my remote devices if they go missing (although I think this is now a free service).

It was easy to move a few iWork files across to the iDisk account and I quickly discovered that I could read them in directly to Pages or Numbers from the iPad, and also export them back to iDisk. It takes a few clicks, but it is relatively painless and provides a mechanism to use a Cloud Store as a virtual file server and access ‘Office’ documents from anywhere. The recent addition of the personal hotspot feature in the iOS software makes remote access on the road even easier. You just need to remember to delete the file from the iPad after you have saved it to ensure you always go to the master in the Cloud (otherwise you could edit a local copy and overwrite a potentially newer remote copy). That is one small downside, but if you follow your own procedure rigidly you won’t go wrong.

The iPad versions of Numbers and Pages don’t have all the features of their desktop brothers, though for the most part this doesn’t cause any issues. However, retention of background colours would be a real plus (even though they are not deleted, editing on the iPad is made harder as a result) and also retaining merged cells in Numbers (which makes editing some spreadsheets a waste of time as the cells are de-merged). However, for straightforward documents and day-to-day number crunching they are sufficient and iPad + iWork + iDisk + iPhone Personal Hotspot makes for a workable mobile office.

The Cloud is brilliant in this regard. It means that the business operating the website (or the web company responsible for it) need not worry about the provision of extra resources to accommodate spikes in demand. The Cloud is built in such a way that it automatically scales and enables additional resources to mirror the website and ensure consistent performance for every visitor. Building a private array of servers to deliver this mirrored facility (a Private Cloud) is expensive, but the availability of a Public Cloud – essentially a publicly shared massive array of servers – brings the power of this key benefit to the (small) business owner.

Here is an example of the ‘worry free’ benefit:

Earlier in January, one of our clients ran a Groupon campaign. We were not advised of this in advance but in one day we saw a 3,000 fold increase in the number of visitors to their website. The website is also built using Flash and has some large graphic images embedded in it. Consequently, every ‘page’ load has a high bandwidth requirement (much more than a regular web page) and the 3,000 fold increase in visitors translated into a 24,000 fold increase in bandwidth requirements. The peak of activity was between 9am and 11am and tailed off gradually over the rest of the working day.

And not one complaint.

The Cloud ensured that suitable resources – servers, memory, CPU, etc – were available automatically so that the client could concentrate on their business knowing that the website would perform. In traditional hosting when single servers are used (whether they are dedicated servers or even virtual), it would have been important to plan for these spikes in traffic by manually provisioning additional resources in advance; in fact, it would be feasible for some virtual hosting environments to fail under the increased load in this example.

At Emissary Consulting, we have embraced Cloud Computing and use it for all our clients’ services – from web hosting to email to spam and anti-virus protection – so that our clients directly benefit from benefits such as guaranteed uptime. For more information about our services, please contact us via the company website.

If you have any questions about this topic, or would like any clarification of any of the points, I look forward to hearing from you in the comments.

However, initial reports said that trying to manage Office activities was difficult if not impractical. This is due to the iPad not offering any traditional style of filestore (like folders) which means you can’t easily drop something onto the iPad, work on it and then export it back to where it came from. True, there is some local storage embedded within iWork, but you need to connect the iPad to a computer to be able to really sync these documents – and if you’re going to do that why not just work on the computer!

The challenge for me comes from the choice of mediums I use, principally Jungledisk in the Cloud. Both my laptop and my base PC connect to a virtual drive located within Jungledisk on Cloud servers over at Rackspace. My PC backs up daily to this cloud also, and other computers we have in the office also back up to this cloud storage. This provides a perfect central repository which we can access from anywhere. For example, I was in a meeting at our accountant’s office recently and needed a file – I logged in to Jungledisk via the web access, downloaded the spreadsheet, opened it on the local machine and completed the work there and then. I did not need to go back to the office and email the file – I could just access it.

For the iPad to be effective for me, I would need to be able to do the same. Aside from the times when I am programming or designing, I don’t need a laptop – I could easily write this blog post on an iPad as it is written in a browser-based interface. I use email on the iPhone regularly (more than the laptop) and it would be great if the iPad could access those cloud-based files.

I held off buying an iPad because of the reports about the (MS) Office issues. I have looked for other applications that could solve the issue, but none really come up to the job – even the virtual/web-based office solutions aren’t great as they require me to change the way I work in order to use them; ie move my files out of my store and into “their” store. This creates complexity as my work files are split into two or more locations.

One thing I did discover was that I could browse my Jungledisk from the iPad and import documents into iWork Papers from there, edit them and save them locally. BUT, I couldn’t get them back to Jungledisk – I could only email them or send them to iWork.com. And I didn’t have any control over fonts (which is a pain when you’re using brand guidelines) or layout because Papers interpreted the tabs from MS Word differently.

The same issue is true of Microsoft Office on the Web. The web versions are suitable replacements for Office (sort of), but you have to move your files into Sky Drive in order to access them effectively (Microsoft’s version of iWork.com). Google Docs is much the same – you have to have your files in Google’s repository.

So, dear Curated Computing provider (Apple, Google & Microsoft, et al), please provide me with an Office application that allows me to keep my documents and all other files (Photoshop, PHP, images, etc, etc) in one place in *my* virtual office cloud and edit/save them from there. Life would be so much simpler. And mobile.

Of course – if any of you reading this know of such a solution that can be used from an iPad (and other computers), please leave a message in the comments below. Thanks.

Last week I bought a small app for my iPhone called Net Status (app store link). The premise is simple – you enter one or more websites that you want to check are running and it scans them and reports back. (Aside: It’s great as a quick check on the road when a client calls and says “my website is down” and gives you a quick way to prove or disprove this. Even when you have other tools that monitor and report uptime, plus a client can use the tool to check themselves).

The interesting thing that the tool does is scan the common ports for the website you enter and then provides a list of ports you want to monitor. You can deselect some, but it showed some very interesting differences between websites hosted on virtual servers, dedicated servers and cloud hosting. Here’s a quick table (based on a LAMP – Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP – setup), but please read the notes following it!

Port	Cloud	Virtual	Dedicated
Ping
http
https
ftp	-
mysql	-
dns	-
telnet	-	-	-
ssh	-
smtp	-
smtps	-	-
pop	-
pops	-	-
imap	-
imaps	-	-
afp	-	-	-
smb	-	-	-
vnc	-	-	-
rdp	-	-	-
lpr	-	-	-
ipp	-	-	-
postressql	-	-	-

The in the table show the ports that can be scanned from the Internet, and so represent easiest routes for a hacker to attempt to exploit the server and your website. Out of the box, a dedicated server has many more possible attack vectors which a sysadmin needs to lock down or manage the security for.

The reason that there are so few attack vectors in the cloud is that the website, the database, email, and often FTP are all separated through different channels (IP routes). This is the nature of the Cloud and one which brings a greater default level of security obfuscation “out of the box”.

However, to provide a balanced view, ports and IP addresses for things such as the database server, the email server, etc, are actually shared between many different sites in the Public Cloud and you may inadvertently be exposed in other ways. For more information on this latter discussion see “When the Clouds break; Risks in the Public Cloud“

Drizzle is a cloud-directed, Linux-leaning, stripped-down, hitherto for unsupported, GPL 2 MySQL 6.0 fork that Rackspace is betting will infinitely scale, or at least scale better than MySQL.

From Wikipedia:

Drizzle is a stripped down version of MySQL v6.0 and as such is planned to have many common MySQL features stripped out such as;

• stored procedures
• query cache
• prepared statements
• views
• triggers
• grants
• some non-pluggable storage engines

In their stead Drizzle is doing:

• micro kernel architecture, making Drizzle more modular than MySQL
• more pluggable interfaces, such as for authentication and for logging
• multi-core optimization (compared to MySQL’s potentially lacking multi-core optimization)
• fewer data types
• fewer engines
• less code making for a smaller and potentially more maintainable codebase

Although less of a functional feature and more of a developmental feature, the Drizzle project is being built to remove distinctions between internal and external contributors, allowing for cleaner community involvement.

While this may be better within a Cloud hosting environment in the long term, the short term is filled with questions for the business such as:

• Should I rework my existing code, or just move my site to somebody providing MySQL?
• Will I need to learn new ways of doing things? Should I invest the time?
• Will the people who host websites with me need to make any changes? Will I lose these clients? How can I make sure they transition effectively?
• Will my third-party developers embrace this change, or will they force me to look for alternative hosting?

Since Drizzle is a MySQL fork, the basic elements of coding should remain the same, but the removal of elements such as stored procedures – a mainstay of database developers – could have far-reaching implications for existing code.

I will be watching the developments of this story as it unfolds as it could affect a lot of people (my company included).

What do you think? What are your views and concerns?

Note that these cases apply can equally to public and private clouds, just as they can to any type of hosted environment. These are not new situations, and the cloud in itself does not magically solve them, but the elastic nature of the cloud can often sweep them under the carpet.

Performance

In a single-server environment it is easy to see that when all your local resources are used up, things will run slowly or stop completely. In the cloud, the same thing is true, but the likelihood of it occurring is (mostly) mitigated by the fact that there is an extensive (but finite) network of computing resources available to scale the output of the web application, limited only by the number of devices available for the application to scale across.

Let’s look at Twitter as an example. In October 2009 we saw lots of “Twitter is over capacity” tweets. If you look at the data these are usually localised to a geographic region. Most of the tweets were Spanish when I checked and I am guessing this was South America experiencing the edge effect of their access route to Twitter becoming over capacity, ie their “corner” of the cloud had reached capacity, because (here in the UK) everything was running perfectly. So, although Twitter’s private cloud appeared to be running correctly (since tweets were being managed), some of the public parts of the network used to access it were not. For an overview of the Twitter infrastructure see this post (may be NSFW due to partial nudity involved to illustrate the discussion of the shared hosting used for Twitter status pages).

Moral of the story: Don’t just consider the availability of resources to run your web application, consider the availability of access points to reach it. Remember, ALL of these are shared, so you don’t want to fall foul of other people’s success. This risk is present for any form of hosting, but Cloud hosting serves to magnify this risk due to higher volumes of sites utilising these access points.

Security

Security in the public cloud space carries many of the same risks as shared hosting since, at some stage in the infrastructure, you will be sharing an IP address, and if this is compromised there is a risk that your data may also be compromised (unless your application has been coded using secure coding principles). You may have read others talking about the risk that your hosting company may have to give up its data to law enforcement agencies if they are subpoenaed, but this is true of any hosting company and any form of hosting and there is nothing you can do about it.

Back to your site security – your site may be vulnerable to, or a target for, hacking. Sites built using popular open source systems such as WordPress, phpBB, Drupal, etc., need to be patched regularly and continuously to stay ahead of the day when the site gets hacked and defaced, or, worse still, user data is stolen. Bespoke sites need to be coded securely and, while they are bespoke and less likely to be attacked, need to be monitored as they may eventually get on to the radar of hackers. Security probes put a continuous strain on the CPU and consume resources almost invisibly – they hardly appear in your bandwidth stats, and probably won’t appear in your web stats. But you will have to pay for them; and this blog is an example of this – the traffic and bandwidth are low relative to the Compute Cycles that are being consumed in order to operate it.

Relevant posts on Cloud Security (although the first is a little sensational in places) are:

• Is Our Data Too Vulnerable in the Cloud? (NY Times)
• Security in the Ether (MIT Technology Review)

Moral of the story: Code securely in the Cloud, monitor how many and what types of sites are on the same IP as you, and definitely monitor Compute Cycles. If you are using open source software, patch often.

Disaster Recovery

This is often overlooked when setting up any form of hosting – the most important question in the client’s mind is “how much is it going to cost?” And they don’t usually want to pay much. Consequently, lower cost services – and this includes Public Cloud Hosting – do not include a backup option, or any means for disaster recovery. So, if there is a problem (with security, or systems failure at the hosting facility) you can quickly find yourself with no means of recovery.

It is possible to adopt the DIY approach and build your own backup and disaster recovery solutions, but good web companies prefer to specialise in one or two aspects of the whole picture – for example, design, coding, CSS, SEO, etc. When it comes to system administration and hosting, these are usually not handled, or outsourced. A good web company will look for a solution that protects its clients in the worst case, and if the (Cloud) Hosting provider does not offer these options, then the promise of the benefits of Cloud Computing can quickly be erased if your web company doesn’t address these issues.

Private Clouds may offer these third-party services as ISPs already offer for dedicated servers – these are often called Managed Services and provide an array of support from patching and upgrading servers, through to backups and 24/7 monitoring.

Moral of the story: Think about the worst case scenario, and what it would cost you to start over. Think about how you solve this issue – through the DIY route, or via third-party managed services of some sort. Talk to your web company to find out what they can do for you.

Personal Experience

I have been experimenting with the adoption of Cloud Computing and, in general things have gone well. It has also highlighted the amount of “under the radar” traffic sites like WordPress blogs get, and how new this technology is.

The benefits have been clearly demonstrated to me – the availability and scalability of the hosting environment to provide consistent performance of the website. As have the risks – random short periods of downtime due to routing issues and database server quirks.

Since Cloud Hosting is a new technology, it is suffering from the inherent issues with anything new – it doesn’t always work, and the people setting it up haven’t quite figured out all the details yet. However, this doesn’t mean it’s not ready and that you should not adopt it. If you are prepared to live with a few glitches (like unexpected downtime when a database cluster has an issue, or an access point gets routed back on itself by the team setting it up and all the websites it serves disappear for an hour) and put some disaster recovery in place (which you should do whichever hosting service you use) then you will be ahead of the competition. Remember that many of your competitors probably used virtual, shared (cheap) hosting and suffer from the same sorts of issues – unexpected downtime, no disaster recovery, and little or no support – so you’ll be getting a better future-proof platform with lower mid-term risks once the ISPs sort out the complicated details of operating this new type of fluid environment.

My company has been using managed dedicated servers from Rackspace for some time now – these are about the best in the business and benefit from 24/7 monitoring and a team on standby to intervene if anything happens to your own database or web server. Issues are resolved within a few minutes. It’s great.

A move to Public Cloud Hosting – to enable greater scalability of business (ours and our clients) at affordable rates – introduces risks which we will need to mitigate to be truly effective. The Public Cloud is managed 24/7 – it has to be to be viable as a business for companies like Rackspace, Amazon and others – but resolutions to issues take more than 5 minutes as they affect much greater sections of infrastructure than just a single server when it has a problem.

Moral of the story: The Public Cloud is a fantastic opportunity but there are risks which need to be mitigated. If you are going to adopt the Public Cloud as a platform to grow your business, ensure you understand the risks and partner with companies that understand them also. This will ensure you mitigate the risks and enjoy good results from your chosen hosting platform.

The Thing Private Clouds Can Do that Public Clouds Can’t | Cloud Computing Journal

Unfortunately, the main argument outlined was actually one of business process engineering, and the writer claimed that adopting the Private Cloud would highlight your inefficiencies and help you streamline your processes while the Public Cloud could not do this.

Sadly, there are numerous examples of companies adopting virtualisation technology (a precursor to the Private Cloud) that have still fallen foul of the same problem by not fixing their operational processes, leading to parts of their IT inventory being underutilised or not working as they should. This shows that the Private Cloud has no bearing on the improvement of operational efficiencies, and this looks like another case of leveraging the term “Cloud” in just because we can.

Having been a management consultant in the field of business process engineering, a company has to decide first if it wants to streamline/improve its processes: this is completely independent of the technology involved. I believe that the 3 Ps (People, Processes, Products – ie technology), considered in order, make a better company and not the other way around.

Later the author talks briefly about the impact of DDoS attacks on Public Clouds and that these attacks are hard to spot and difficult to resolve due to the large scale of the Public Cloud. I touched on this at the end of my recent post on hosting types, and agree that these types of attacks are harder to spot and take longer to fix in Public Clouds than Private Clouds simply due to the relative scale of the Public Cloud to the Private Cloud, but then if you added a thimble of water to a lake you’d probably not notice the difference, but if you added it to a glass you’d be able to spot the change more easily.

For a good insight into thoughts on Private Cloud, read Private Clouds: A Valuable Concept or Buzzword Bingo? and Why Cloud is at the Top of the CIO’s Priorities.