The cloud shouldn't be an over the top service

The public Internet and the cloud shouldn’t mix, according to a paper out today from Joe Weinman of HP. Cisco seems to agree, if Tuesday’s announcement of its CloudVerse suite of products is any indication. A growing number of endpoints, the multiple services built within web applications and the infinite variety of demands made on any web-based service mean the network can’t be trusted to run over the top.

Instead, the industry will need to move to pay-per-use, dynamic networks where possible to improve the economic benefits of cloud scenarios and deliver defined quality-of-service for applications that will require low latency, argues Weinman. Weinman, who moved over to HP from AT&T last year, is a deep thinker on the economics of cloud computing. He as well argues that bandwidth will in the end be charged on a pay-per-use model for both consumers and enterprises.

He makes a good case for the importance of a smarter network in the context of delivering cloud services, something Cisco’s CloudVerse announcement today as well supports. CloudVerse at heart organizes Cisco’s existing networking products for the data center and links them back to the networking gear already in carrier and service provider networks, with the idea being that an intelligent network can take the fuzziness out of managing applications in the cloud.

It’s true that applications are growing more complex and relying on more protocols to deliver a variety of services over the web. Take, for instance, an application like Google +. There are real-time streaming components, a video conferencing set up and document sharing. Each different element requires different levels of network quality, which is why Weinman argues for networks that run faster, not just on a megabit-per-second basis, nevertheless also with less latency. From the paper:

Human performance studies show that 200 to 250 milliseconds is acceptable for multimedia conferencing and collaboration applications. Nevertheless, interactive tasks just as keystrokes and mousedowns must be responded to within about 150 milliseconds [10], and emerging online games require even lower latencies.There are as well empirical results showing the importance of low latency not just in terms of user experience, nevertheless in terms of revenue. Lower latency directly correlates with increased revenue [11].

Add in the complexity at the end point in terms of the number of devices that connect to the network and it gets worse. Sensor networks, plus more devices per person and more concurrent streams coming in per device require more bandwidth. It as well requires more intelligent bandwidth that can allocate resources and deal with emergent effects like in-office or in-home congestion and odd spikes in traffic in case of unexpected events. For instance, a pipe breaking in a sensor-equipped home in the middle of the afternoon when the house is empty may create a sudden spike in traffic as humidity sensors activate, power gets shut in certain areas and you check in via a home camera system to see why your home network is going crazy. However because that’s an unexpected spike in a broadly speaking dull time, will your service provider have the bandwidth capacity to meet that event?

Weinman as well offers the holy grail of true cloudbursting as an illustration where adding network intelligence makes it easier to scale a workload from one data center to another in times of peak demand. He lists five ways of doing this, beginning with the simplest idea of dividing up tasks between various clouds, which requires little to no network intelligence. He concludes with a network that can push a huge amount of data as needed and very quickly, nevertheless which would require infinite bandwidth. Since this last approach is impractical, he suggests providing pay-per-use bandwidth as the easiest way to instantly replicate data during keeping costs in line.

To help deliver the type of fine-grained control that intelligent networks will need, Weinman believes software-defined networks, just as those created using protocols like OpenFlow, are a way to add intelligence and flexibility. Using open protocols to create the networks are a good way to make sure that the added intelligence doesn’t act as a way to lock in users. Weinman as well covers additional topics that will require innovation in bringing forth these new networks for cloud computing, and I highly recommend folks check out his paper.

So what does this have to do with Cisco’s marketing effort around CloudVerse? In essence, with the suite of products that wrap data center networking in with the networks of service providers for wireline and mobile broadband, Cisco is recognizing that a holistic, intelligent network could be a huge selling point for those concerned about piecing at the same time their own fragmented network components to deliver web services and cloud services. A quote from the Cisco release sums up the news nicely:

“Until now cloud research resided in silos, making it harder to build and manage clouds, and to interconnect multiple clouds, posing critical challenges for many organizations,” said Padmasree Warrior, Cisco senior vice president of engineering and chief research officer. “Cisco uniquely enables the world of many clouds - connecting people, communities and organizations with a business-class cloud user experience for the at once-generation Internet.”

Cisco and Weinman are not alone. Alcatel-Lucent recently outlined its vision of as service provider cloud that adds intelligence to the network after a fashion that many enterprise and business clients will find appealing.

Could someone build a fully functioning network without resorting to all-Cisco gear, or like as not even Weinman’s view of the intelligent network? Yes, nevertheless it takes skill and dedication that places just as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other webscale operators have, and other companies just don’t seem to want to bother with.