neatComponents and Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is a solution to problems where extreme scalability is required, and is particularly useful if the scale is likely to change rapidly or unpredictably.

Cloud Computing works, in essence, by providing a large number of servers which can be harnessed to provide a clustered service, with servers being added or removed from the service to reflect demand from moment to moment. In the 'public cloud' servers are made available by large suppliers – Amazon, Google, etc – to be used for a fee by large numbers of individual site owners. In a 'private cloud' the servers are for your own use, but the architectural principles are otherwise the same – albeit at a smaller scale.

Whilst the benefits of Cloud Computing are clear, there are also significant technical, commercial and legal limitations. Three of the most significant are:

Synchronisation (veracity)

The fundamental technical issue is one of keeping the multitude of servers synchronised. Where content is simply being accumulated – that is to say, existing data is not being modified, then this is not so severe, but if data needs to be changed, and if it is important that the latest version is immediately available to all users of the system, then there can be significant performance challenges.

Control (resilience)

With a public cloud the machines are, by definition, under the control of a third party. Whilst cloud operators are, by their nature, large organisations, that in itself does not mean that they will continue to exist, or if they do, that they will continue to pursue the cloud model as part of their business. For example, the Amazon cloud was effectively born out of their spare server capacity – but they could choose to retrench and concentrate on their original ecommerce store business, abandoning their cloud users.

Legal (privacy)

Whilst one of the strengths of clouds is that they can be in diverse geographical locations, providing low-latency connections to users throughout the world, this means that data comes under multiple legal jurisdictions, and is subject to interception be foreign powers. Whilst this may seem harmless, the lack of control may preclude the use of the cloud for applications where there are conflicting data protection requirements – be they legal – HIPAA, FSA etc or simply morally desirable.

Faced with these obstacles, it could be thought that there is no place for cloud computing in the mainstream, however there are some scenarios where it can be helpful, if positioned correctly. The best way to think of it is as the 'heavy lifting' team, ready to provide assistance when the scale of processing becomes overwhelming for a single server. The challenge is in choosing those tasks which are best suited to being delegated to this capability.

For example:

Static public resource caching

If you have a site with a large quantity of resources (images, audio-video etc) which you need to make available to many users, then they can be stored on the cloud, and served directly to the users from it. This works best if there are no privacy or security concerns – ie anyone is allowed to access the items, without payment or registration.

Background processing

This is where a time-consuming task needs to be carried out, which can easily be shared amongst a large number of machines (with the results then fed back to a non-cloud server, or kept in the cloud as a static public resource). Examples of this include image and video manipulation (resizing, trans-coding etc), object recognition and categorisation, personalised email shots (mail merging), and log file analysis.

Site searching

Full text searching of content on sites can be cpu intensive, given that the search needs to take into account usergroup permissions, to only show results the user is permitted to see.

Integration with neatComponents

The neatComponents site administrator simply provides their cloud computing login credentials to neatComponents, and it does the rest.

Where there are tasks such as those listed above which could benefit from the cloud, and a cloud is available for use, it transfers those tasks seamlessly. There is no need to make configuration changes or otherwise be aware that the cloud is being used by system – other than it simply working more efficiently.

Should the cloud no-longer be available, either permanently or due to a temporary outage, the neatComponents system falls back to performing the tasks locally.

 

Please contact us for details and pricing for neatComponents Cloud Computing integration