There’s an article on ZDNet talking about a video where Sun Microsystems CTO Lew Tucker talks about how future cloud computing applications will be able to know exactly how much demand there is for the application, and requisition the appropriate amount of computing power. During high demand, the application could grab more resources, preventing application-based slowdowns, and during low demand, the application could release resources back into the cloud, saving the company money.
Of course, ZDNet’s title for the article is “Future Cloud Apps won’t need humans” which conjures up frightening images.
If it’s any indication, dynamic allocation of the needs of information will cause anxious consternation about the continued necessitation of the IT occupation, and frantic desperation. (Of course, that’s just idle speculation.)
But it might be more accurate to suggest that “Future Cloud Apps won’t need humans to babysit them.” That is – all that Tucker talks about is the idea of taking what used to be a manual process – deciding how much processing power any particular application needs – and having the computer make that determination on the fly based on the actual processing power needs. Certainly, humans will be involved in determining how much power is “too much,” how much slowdown is “acceptable,” and – most importantly – how much performance that the end-users can actually use.
This has two main impacts on the networking side of IT – that is, if an application can dynamically allocate more resources during times of excess need, application performance may be limited on the server or on the network, but it eliminates one of the main causes of application performance problems – not assigning enough resources to the application.
Additionally, application performance becomes important independent of the network, as a poorly coded application might need more resources and therefore require more money to operate.
Secondly, when you essentially remove the limits on application performance by simply allowing it enough resources to do the job at any time of the day, you have to continue to look for other bottlenecks. If you have the capacity to do more with what you’ve got, it makes sense to do everything you can to take advantage of that capacity.
Now, before this possibility becomes a reality, cloud computing standards need to be developed, agreed upon, and used in order to have multiple applications cooperate in any dynamically scaling environment. That may be very soon, or a long way off, but it will probably happen, because there’s just too much money to be missed out on if there isn’t a cloud computing interoperability standard.
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