By
Goran Novkovic, CQA, CSQE, ITIL, APM, PMP, PEng
This
blog is part of a series called Manufacturing in the Cloud. This series aims to assist
manufacturing organizations to evaluate how they can overcome challenges and
maximize cloud computing benefits. As cloud computing services mature both
commercially and technologically, this is likely to become relatively easier to
achieve.
From the previous blog ‘Part II: 5 Characteristics of Cloud Computing’ we looked at the characteristics
that help define what we know today as cloud computing as defined by the National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST). In this
blog, we will take a deeper look into how virtualization plays a significant
part in cloud computing.
There is a widely held view that cloud
computing is not a new concept. Indeed, many of the technologies and services
associated with cloud computing, such as virtualization, has been in existence
for some time. What is different in cloud computing is that these technologies
are being implemented in new ways to provide dynamic, scalable and virtualized computing infrastructure, platforms and
software.
These technologies allow manufacturing
organizations to achieve improved utilization and efficiency of their service
providers’ infrastructure through the controlled sharing of computing resources
with other customers (multi-tenancy), and greater flexibility to scale up and
down IT services. In some respects, cloud computing represents the maturing of
these technologies.
Cloud
computing relies on virtualization. Cloud computing depends on virtualization.
Cloud services rely heavily on virtualization, but the opposite is not true.
So just because we have virtual machines on our network, it doesn't mean that
we've got a cloud. A cloud involves other characteristics we already discussed.
So virtualization itself does not constitute a cloud. But if we've got a cloud
computing environment, it implies virtualization to drive it. Virtualization
technology is nothing new. It's been around for decades, but now it is being
used with cloud computing to allow for the rapid elasticity or the provisioning
and de-provisioning of cloud resources.
Again, we can think of cloud computing as
a new business model based on old technology. The new business model part
involves the fact that manufacturing organizations are not laying out a capital
expenditure to provision IT services. Instead, manufacturing organizations are
shifting from capital expenditures to operating expenditures, because they are
paying a recurring subscription fee based on their usage over time. The old
technology part includes computer networks. Computer networks have certainly
increased in speed over the years. But computer networks themselves are an old
technology just like virtualization is also an old technology.
Virtualization allows multiple virtual
machines to run on one physical computer, all at the same time. Each of the
virtual machines have their own operating system and they behave as if they are
actually each running on their own separate computer (physically), but they're
not. Instead, they are running on top of
a hypervisor. The hypervisor manages access to the hardware for each
virtual machine. Each virtual machine running an operating system can also be
running a series of applications like you normally could run on a real physical
computer. Virtual machines in the cloud are useful, because manufacturing
organizations can host custom applications on that virtual machine in the cloud
or they might develop new applications and test it all in the cloud before they
roll it out in production.
HOW
CLOUD PROVIDERS SCALE
Virtualization offers many benefits to
the cloud environment in terms of efficient resource utilization. The
utilization involves cloud computing resource utilization. Cloud providers
benefit from the economies of scale. This makes it possible for the cloud
provider to be able to afford the proper cloud computing equipment and to pay
for the expertise to manage it, because they have so many cloud customers. If
we were to acquire hardware for a single manufacturing organization, we might
not fully utilize hardware capabilities. But in a cloud computing environment
with virtualization, it's all pooled together and as various cloud service
customers need more compute resource power, they get it. Without
virtualization, large-scale and dynamic cloud computing data centers would not
exist to the extent that they do today.
So with cloud computing, really what we
are doing is we are using technology that's been around for a while in a
different manner. That's really what cloud computing is. The cloud provider has
the infrastructure on which our IT services run. So they host our services and
give us access to them if we were a cloud consumer over a network.
Manufacturing organizations as cloud consumers are billed for what they use in
terms of the IT services.
Has your
experience with cloud been successful? Have you run into issues? Email me or
start a reply to this blog or in MESA’s LinkedIn Group
to voice your experience or concerns.
Next week
I’ll talk about the last topic in this series, Present and Future Cloud
Computing.
Goran
Novkovic, CQA, CSQE, ITIL, APM, PMP, PEng
Goran Novkovic has over 15 years of
experience in various regulated industry sectors. His expertise is in industrial
control systems (ICS) cybersecurity, control systems engineering, computer
systems validation, software security and test management, cloud security and
regulatory compliance. Goran has a formal education in Electrical Engineering
and Project Management and possesses a master's degree in Information
Technology. He has number of professional licenses and designations. He is holder of CQA (Certified Quality Auditor) and
CSQE (Certified Software Quality Engineer) certifications with ASQ (American
Society for Quality). Goran is certified ITIL, certified Agile Project Manager
and Project Management Professional with PMI (Project Management Institute). He
is licensed Professional Engineer with PEO (Professional Engineers Ontario).
Goran is focused on ICS cybersecurity and he is helping organizations to
establish ICS cybersecurity governance and develop effective ICS cybersecurity
programs from scratch. E-mail contact:
gnovkov@toronto.ca
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