Andy, MICE

So how do we apply cloud computing?

Say your company is organizing a nation wide event. A marathon for example. Banks love to organize marathons. :P Now, you will want to start a website for this marathon. This increases your online presence for marketing, as well as other functions like collecting payment and disseminating information. So for this period of the event, say one month, your company website will probably receive an additional 10,000 visits a day.

Are you going to buy a new server to run this website? Of course not! No IT savvy and informed person will do that. Your servers should be reserved for your core business applications like accounting, banking, customer database, etc. So the solution - simple! Host your event website in the clouds!

Let's take another example. Say your company have been accumulating hundreds and thousands or hard copy documents over the years. One day, your boss have this revelation that all these documents can be stored in soft copy to save space.

You have been given the task to get all these documents scanned, processed, sorted and filed - all in one week. That's not impossible anymore! By hosting your OCR application in the clouds, you can increase your number of server to hundreds for that one week. Hundreds of servers on demand. Immense amount of additional processing power at your disposal. Your project completed well within stipulated time. Once your project ended? Simply reduce all the servers to what you need.

Cloud computing? Your answer to impossible tasks.

Let's say you have a website which you put in a computer or server. This is called hosting. When the number of visitors to your website increases, the traffic becomes heavy and your server potentially crashes. This creates unhappy visitors.

Traditionally, when that happens, you can buy or rent more servers to cope with the extra traffic. That's a lot of $$$.

Now, with cloud computing, you can almost instantaneously scale up or down depending on the demand. When the number of visitors to your website increases, you can get extra bandwidth and storage on demand. This enables you to cope with the increase, no matter what the volume is. When the demand decreases, you can scale down the resources again.

Everyone is happy.

Read about Part I here.

Everyone with a website or accounting software/customer relationship module that is shared at company level will have a server.

A server is a piece of hardware that sits in the company's server room, or one that is rented from a  hosting company. A server is the gate keeper to the world wide web.

Now with cloud computing, you dont need a server. You simply host your website or application in the 'clouds'. :)

What's the advantage of that? You dont need a server of course! Server costs a lot of money. Thousands to purchase and maintain annually. Thousands to rent it from hosting companies and for the set up fees.

So, lesson number one. Cloud can potentially save a lot of money.

Read on to Part II

I was aghast to discover the amount of money people are willing to pay for a website.

Now, to build a functionally website with backend function is one thing, to build a website with static pages is another. I am probably inviting attack from many parties with this question, but still: "WHY PAY SO MUCH FOR SOMETHING YOU CAN EASILY DO YOURSELF?"

That's right! Static pages, which are perfect for product marketing and launches, event websites, etc can be done at virtually no cost! Google sweetens the deal with their latest candy - the Google App Engine (GAE). With the App Engine, you can easily build and maintain your application, and scale up your storage and bandwidth needs when necessary. With no server to maintain, no set up cost and no recurring fees, it is pretty hard to go wrong with GAE. All you need is an administrator with programming knowledge and willingness to learn.

Not convinced that cheap is good? Well, most people wouldn't be. Recently, a close friend divulged that her company brought in a consultant to increase the productivity of the employees. This consultant did such a great job, the company hired the founder of the consulting firm the next year, for an insane sum of money. The realized with horror that not only was this expensive founder not as good as the consultant, he was bad. Very bad.

Knowing that you can probably do the same, would you still engage expensive companies to create your websites? Of course not! Learn how to utilize the free Google App Engine to create your beautiful websites. Then, you will truly discover that you can definitely pay less for more.

Happy New Year everyone!

As the euphoria of welcoming year 2010 is slowly waning off, everyone is willingly or unwillingly trudging back to our offices after a long deserved break, slowly trying to gain momentum in work again.

What better way to start our new year than attending a series of breakthrough technology courses? Odeon is proud to present the much anticipated Cloud Computing and specifically Google App Engine with Python courses, as early as February!

Get your seats now!

Do contact andy.tan@od-eon.com for further enquiries. Have a wonderful day!

After discussing cloud computing with several friends and getting all excited about it, we finally launched our first e-mail marketing campaign. It took a few days to prepare, and we're finally launched! This is the first milestone. We're finally starting.

This is going to be exciting.
The IT community is going to benefit from this.
It's going to start getting busy...and I can't wait.