Richard Siggs & Network Presence

We’ve been working on ‘cloud computing‘ for decades before the term was coined, but nowadays it’s getting easier and easier to find reasons to use cloud computing for your own purposes. Even most iPhone users nowadays with iOS 5 are using cloud computing through Apple’s aptly named “iCloud” service, so it’s certainly a common and widely used by millions of people daily kind-of IT service.

From our perspective though, the term “cloud computing” has a few requirements, the two main ones being;

On-demand capabilities – where you’re able to start and stop resources used whenever you want, and just pay for that usage

An API – so you can integrate those on-demand capabilities into some form of programmatic or automatic method of utilising your cloud based resources.

Sometimes Virtualisation is listed as a requirement of cloud computing, but that’s not always the case and usually you can’t “put your hand on the physical server” that’s providing you with your cloud computing services because it’s in a remote Data Centre somewhere.

Based on the above, there are two main types (and a ‘hybrid’ of them) of cloud computing, being;

Public Cloud – where you use resources which are shared amongst other users and where those resources are often available on the general Internet,

and

Private Cloud – where you run the resources which provide your cloud computing capabilities, either “in-house” or in a private network or on your own or rented ‘Colo’ equipment in Data Centres.

This leads us to an example deployment of cloud computing services that customers have let us know of their use of our products:

The customer wants to put online a custom Java App, either through Tomcat or Glassfish. They copy their “go live” build to the VPS Appliance that we put online for them and the App is online in minutes.
But some time after running that VPS and their Java App their site “goes viral” and thus they very quickly need more computing resources. We quickly meet with them and knowing Java Hosting requirements, we cluster their Java Application Server (a Tomcat) and provide them with web and API based means to launch additional VPS to join their cluster when and as end-user or web consumer load hits their site.

We can provide you with either of the above types of Cloud Computing deployments (ie: Public or Private), as well as the combination or blend of them, called Hybrid Clouds, where some aspects are utilising shared infrastructure and may be on the public Internet, and other components or systems may be private or on dedicated infrastructure. We can also do that by providing the on-demand and API aspects which we believe are required for cloud computing.

Cloud Computing, Virtualisation and customised or bespoke online services are our long-term speciality, so please feel free to contact us with any enquiry or to discuss your requirements.