What kind of work is involved in cloud Computing

Darith

Sorry if this seems a simple question. But what kind of work is involved in cloud computing. I have not studied it yet. I know it involves saas and servers plus a bit of networking. Is there any programming involved or is it just server administration?

srsly78

Well if you are a programmer then you will be doing programming. If you are an admin then you will be admining things.

Cloud computing doesn't really mean anything - we have been using servers for a long time now. A programmer does not really care where code gets run.

ChRoMe

srsly78 wrote: »

A programmer does not really care where code gets run.

Eh.... kinda.

Zombrex

Darith wrote: »

Sorry if this seems a simple question. But what kind of work is involved in cloud computing. I have not studied it yet. I know it involves saas and servers plus a bit of networking. Is there any programming involved or is it just server administration?

Do you mean in running a cloud computing setup? Or do you mean writing programs to run on a cloud computing setup.

If you are just a programmer wanting a virtual machine in the cloud then there is nothing extra about it being virtual, it appears to you to be just a Linux/Windows box with a certain amount of hardware etc.

If you are a systems admin for a company using cloud computing then there is a little bit of work setting up these virtual machines and configuring how they talk to each other, but after that they are again just like normal machines, you install an OS on them, set up the programmes you want etc.

If you are an actual company running a cloud computing service (like Amazon) there is a lot of work involve and you have to know the ins and outs of virtualisation. No idea what Amazon uses, but a common virtualisation program is Xen, which RedHat bases their virtualisation software on.

If you are saying you got 4 old PCs lying around and you want to make your own virtualisation cloud check out RedHat or Ubuntu documentation on virtualisation

Darith

Zombrex wrote: »

Do you mean in running a cloud computing setup? Or do you mean writing programs to run on a cloud computing setup.

If you are just a programmer wanting a virtual machine in the cloud then there is nothing extra about it being virtual, it appears to you to be just a Linux/Windows box with a certain amount of hardware etc.

If you are a systems admin for a company using cloud computing then there is a little bit of work setting up these virtual machines and configuring how they talk to each other, but after that they are again just like normal machines, you install an OS on them, set up the programmes you want etc.

If you are an actual company running a cloud computing service (like Amazon) there is a lot of work involve and you have to know the ins and outs of virtualisation. No idea what Amazon uses, but a common virtualisation program is Xen, which RedHat bases their virtualisation software on.

If you are saying you got 4 old PCs lying around and you want to make your own virtualisation cloud check out RedHat or Ubuntu documentation on virtualisation

Just trying understand the work involved. As indicated it could mean admin of servers or virtual OSs'. I would like to know is there interesting scripting or programming involved. I guess for amazon that could mean the creation of applications for the creation of virtual services?

IRLConor

It's all the same work as "regular" computing, with a few tweaks. Pretty much any job that's done in non-cloud computing is also done somewhere in the cloud computing world.

Zombrex

Darith wrote: »

Just trying understand the work involved.

The work involved will depend on what you are trying to do.

Most cloud computing services have a graphic user interface (normally web based), that allows an admin to create, configure, backup and destroy virtual machines.

But they also (well Amazon at least) provide an API that allows you to write scripts to automate this process.

For example, you might write a script as part of your load monitoring set up that will automatically create a new virtual machine if you find the load on your existing machines is getting high. The script can then bring down the machine afterwards.

There are also software packages to manage this stuff, such as "Chef", which is a set of scripts to set up and configure different types of machines (e.g. Ubuntu Linux with a webserver).

If you want to play around with Chef on your local machine check out Vagrant, it creates virtual machines using VirtualBox and auto configures them using Chef (or Puppet)

http://www.vagrantup.com/

jimmycrackcorm

If I were to give a simple definition then it would be the provision of a software service to many customers in a scalable manner.

It involves programming the service so that it can distinguish between customers and the replication of resources to handle expanding numbers of those customers.