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From the Editors: Google ascends into the cloud


By SD Times News Team
May 1, 2008 — 
To get a sense of Google’s size, consider this: If you google “Google,” you get 2.1 billion search results. Google “God,” and you get merely 486 million. Now, Google wouldn’t claim to be four times more popular than the Almighty, of course, but perhaps the company is moving into His lofty neighborhood: the cloud.

Recently, Google placed two big bets that computing is indeed moving up into the cloud. First, it is partnering with Salesforce to put its Google Apps portfolio onto Salesforce’s SaaS platform. Second, it offers a preview release of App Engine, which will let software developers create applications and host them on Google’s massive infrastructure.

BusinessWeek called this cloud strategy “Google’s Next Dream” in a Dec. 24, 2007 cover story, showing that this capability affects far more than IT departments. When executed properly, cloud computing saves enterprises the hassle of figuring out how many servers they need to provision, how much space they have or how much electricity they can afford.

While computing power as a service isn’t a new notion, modern uber-companies such as Google are in the best position to be the computing infrastructure for others. Another big player is Amazon.com and its Elastic Compute Cloud service. Salesforce.com also has its platform, The Force.

Just as important as being able to scale up computing resources as needed, an enterprise also must be able to scale down. This avoids the situation where different departments in an organization hoard servers or storage in case they need them, even though they haven’t used such storage in months. In today’s ultracompetitive economy, being able to scale down is one of cloud computing’s most compelling boardroom arguments.

To be sure, some of those clouds look dark and threatening to others. Many organizations are rightfully skittish about yielding control over their computing resources to an outsider—any outsider. Google’s vaunted “Don’t be evil” pledge does not reassure skeptics who worry how well Google, or any other cloud-computing provider, would safeguard their data.

Even so, enterprises trust their information to all sorts of people outside their walls—contractors and partners, for example—so the precedent is there for all but the most critical information. And even there, if cloud computing delivers convenience and value, then the market will embrace it, whether it’s from Google, Amazon or anyone else.

Multicore’s supporting cast assembles

The trouble with covering news is that one is so often focused on the freshest new thing out there that it’s easy to forget that the rest of the world is catching up with fresh and new. We’ve covered the growth of multicore processor technology over the last few years, and having done so, we’re glad to see that education and tooling are beginning to ride the multicore wave.

Anyone who thinks the challenges of programming for the new processing platforms are trivial is kidding himself, in no small part because the options are numerous, and it’s going to take time to sort out what works and what doesn’t. That it’s only taking a couple of years for university computer science departments to catch on to the demand for multicore-specific education is a tribute to what is ordinarily a slow-moving beast.

Quite simply, not all code can or ought to take advantage of multicore technology. The trick will be to identify those parts of one’s software portfolio that can achieve the most by a rewrite, what has to be rethought from the ground up, and what can be left alone. No consultant or coursework will be able to decide that for a business, and companies would be wise to ensure that their developers take advantage of today’s advances in tooling, rather than wait for something better to come along.


Related Search Term(s): Cloud computing, Google, multicore


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