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Who’s using cloud computing, and who’s not

Tony Chan | July 6, 2009 | 0 Comments

As cloud computing gains acceptance as a mainstream technology platform, questions has also emerged on the benefits and challenges of the platform. While the efficiency benefits of clouds are widely recognised, there is now emerging debate on the ability of clouds to provide adequate security and reliability for enterprise applications, particularly in light of government cloud initiatives around the world.

And while there have been lots of news from cloud operators and technology vendors, there is little information about who is actually using cloud platforms.

There are the obvious names, such as Google’s assortment of applications and salesforce.com, but these services are deployed on internal clouds built and operated by the companies themselves, and not users of public cloud services operated by a third party vendor, or companies building out new infrastructures to transition their business to a cloud model.

Interestingly, while cloud computing is front and centre in the mediasphere, companies who actually have signed up for clouds have remained taciturn – except for a handful. So who is actually using cloud services and are not afraid to talk about it?

Online gaming platforms for one. Online game providers have some peculiar requirements that make them ideal candidates for clouds. For starters, they need a massive amount of processing power to support their users, lots of data for game information, and traffic that can fluctuate vastly depending on the time of day – almost perfect fits for the cloud model.

CYBERGAMER
CyberGamer, a free website dedicated to competitive online gaming that conducts leagues, ladders, and other interactive content for PC and Xbox360 gamers, has tapped The Rackspace Cloud to support its growing number of subscribers. According to this Rackspace blog post, the site has increased its membership from 1,000 users after the six months of launch, to some 21,000 by the end of the second year.

“Hosting a website like ours can be a difficult task,” says Richard Lawes, business manager of Cybergamer Australia. “Not only are we concerned about the traffic flowing through the site, but we also have to consider computing power. Since the majority of our content is generated from data stored in SQL databases, the amount of queries simultaneously running 24/7 is too much for a single server to handle. We tried virtualization, but often found the costs to be prohibitive as we were consistently paying for data and hardware that were only being utilized during peak periods.”

Because of the complications of these calculations, when the website did spike to utilize the entire server during peak times, it would often hit a threshold and stop allowing new visitors and members to view content.

“We spent a lot of time investigating other means of hosting,” explains Lawes, “and after many trials and feature comparisons, we couldn’t find a hosting provider that had as many features as The Rackspace Cloud with as good of a pricing structure. Our trial was successful and we went into our agreement with The Rackspace Cloud with confidence.”

CyberGamer thoroughly planned and executed their transfer to The Rackspace Cloud with virtually no site downtime and a 137% increase in traffic within the first month. “We were literally stunned by just how much traffic we had unlocked in our hosting switch,” says Lawes. “It was almost impossible to count how much traffic we were losing on our previous hosting solution due to the site not accepting traffic because the hardware was under high load.”

Lawes describes his favorite moment with The Rackspace Cloud; “It’s that peak time of the night where our server would be hitting critical mass. I’m watching the amount of users online, dreading the sight of that high load error, and instead watching it rise up to 150% above our previous threshold – and the page loads just as fast as it did with 3 users.”

BLIZZARD
Another gamer provider, Blizzard Entertainment, the developer of the popular Starcraft strategy game, will reportedly host the new Starcraft II release on its own Battle.net cloud service, foregoing support for LAN-based gaming, a popular option with the previous version. According Dave Rosenberg at CNET, the company hopes that all multi-player gaming with Starcraft II and future titles to run on battle.net.

While this obviously has commercial benefits for Blizzard since all gamers looking to play against others will have to sign up for battle.net, Blizzard also notes that using a cloud-based model also reduces the risk of software pirates.

“We don’t currently plan to support LAN play with Starcraft II, as we are building Battle.net to be the ideal destination for multiplayer gaming with Starcraft II and future Blizzard Entertainment games,” a Blizzard representative told Rosenberg. “While this was a difficult decision for us, we felt that moving away from LAN play and directing players to our upgraded Battle.net service was the best option to ensure a quality multiplayer experience with Starcraft II and safeguard against piracy.”

WHO ELSE?
In a way, Starcraft II doesn’t even count since it will be running on Blizzard’s own battle.net service. Rackspace has been one of the few cloud platform providers to actually convinced their customers to go public. Rackspace’s cloud customers include Tweetphoto, a service currently in beta that lets users link photos to their Twitter accounts.

It should come as little surprise that cloud users have not honk any horns when it comes to adoption. After all, cloud subscriptions are supposed to be flexible, and even temporarily, so there’s no long term commitment – at least not for now. At the same time, clouds are still relatively unproven in terms of reliability as well as security, so what corporation would want to let their customers, competitors or shareholders know that they are adopting it, or even considering it, for their internal IT operations?

WHO IS NOT USING CLOUDS
What is a surprise is that at least one company has said it will not use clouds. The surprise is further accentuated because that particular company is Twitter, which, given the model of millions of users sending millions more short notes online – all at sporadic times and from around the world – should have been a perfect fit for the scalable cloud model.

Not so, says John Adams at Twitter Operations, at the Velocity conference (you can read a round up of Adams presentation at Dave Ohara’s Green Data Center Blog.)

On one slide, Adams writes: “No clouds. We tried that!” According to Adam, Twitter needs “raw processing power,” and that the latency is too high in existing cloud offerings. While he doesn’t exactly explain what that latency is (processing power? network latency? delayed access to resources?), the rest of his presentations highlights a near obsession with measuring the performance of Twitter with every possible metrics in order to find what he calls the “weakest point” and solve potential performance and capacity issues before they happen.

I strongly suspect it is not the latency of cloud computing to provide processing power to applications, but rather the ability of cloud infrastructures to support the massive real-time application management requirements of Twitter, that Adams is pointing to. Cloud providers have so far been focused on providing real time resources to applications. If I interpret Adams correctly, they will also have to support a wide range of application management and reporting requirements that are already inside enterprise IT environments today if they want to attract corporations like Twitter to their offerings.

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