Cloud Computing Preaches Design for Failure - Ezhil Arasan Babaraj

Mr. Ezhil Arasan Babaraj is primarily into research and development. One of his favorite platforms is cloud and its related technologies. He has been involved in cloud computing for about four years an has done noteworthy R&D in public and private cloud. He is associated with CSS Corp for the past 6 years and is currently managing the R&D division at CSS Corp. Ezhil and his team is actively into developing and maintaining various open source and commercial tools using Cloud Platforms such as AWS, Eucalyptus…etc. He is currently focusing on building private cloud platform for enterprise using various open source tools like Eucalyptus, Xen, KVM...etc.

Though every market research firm is predicting a robust growth in cloud computing adoption (SaaS+PaaS+IaaS) yet it seems the cloud adoption is not picking up as predicted. What is your experience?

We have been experiencing good growth in our cloud based services. As you know, the public cloud has still not penetrated well in the enterprise segment and only enterprise adoption can drive rapid growth in cloud computing. We see great potential for private cloud adoption across various business houses.

What are the different cloud services offered by CSS Corp? How does it benefit the users?

CSS Corp covers the entire life cycle of cloud computing adoption for enterprises and business houses. Being a system integrator, we offer design, prototyping, orchestration, management and monitoring services for cloud Infrastructure.

We offer standard solution stack for

• Single Tenant SaaS enablement
• Enterprise Email Archival
• Consumer & Enterprise Desktop & Server Backup
• Cloud Orchestration, Hosting & Monitoring

CSS Corp's CloudBuddy suite of products helps us quickly build a customized solution for our customer's need. From our CSS Corp R&D Labs we contribute to the open source world as well. Our flagship projects like Hybridfox and CloudSmart are available as open source in Google code.

I have listed the following products from CSS Corp that have lent us a lead over our competitors.

• Hybridfox – to manage multiple cloud environments
• CloudSmart - to automate infrastructure and application provisioning in cloud
• CloudBuddy Personal - to easily manage S3 and monitor multiple AWS accounts
• CloudBuddy Retail – to ease cloud storage for consumers
• CloudBuddy Enterprise – to facilitate cloud storage and file sharing among enterprise users
• CloudVault – to archive emails in cloud with a built-in workflow
• Arecord.net – to address the zone apex issue in cloud and traditional computing platforms
• CloudBuddy Analytics – to provide analytics related to S3
• EucaWatch – to monitor private cloud instances

What is CloudBuddy? Why do you call it cloud though it needs to be downloaded and is NOT browser based?

CloudBuddy is a suite of products comprising of a Personal, Retail & Enterprise version. It is CSS Corp's identity for our cloud related products & offerings. The CloudBuddy Personal is a tool that primarily allows a Cloud Administrator to effectively manage storage & computing cloud such as AWS S3, EC2 & Eucalyptus. It comes with various innovative Plug-in's such as S3 Websites, CloudFront, AWS EC2 dashboard...etc. The technology behind the CloudBuddy Personal plug-in architecture allows one to quickly develop and integrate various third party tools as plug-ins. The CloudBuddy Personal was developed as a Windows tool to exploit various native features of Windows. Also, it is a myth that a Cloud based tool should not be a desktop tool.

What is Hybridfox?

Hybridfox is a firexfox plug-in to manage multiple cloud computing technologies such as AWS EC2, Eucalyptus and OpenStack. It is one of the several open source tools from CSS Corp R&D Labs. Hybridfox has a wide industry acceptance and has crossed nearly 20,000 downloads so far. You can download it from http://code.google.com/p/hybridfox/

What is CSS Corp's vision for cloud for the next 12 months?

Our vision is to become a global leader in ICT related services and we have a strong foundation to do so. We have a very good track record of achieving our mission 100% referenceable customers as well.

Our vision for cloud computing is to become a global leader in the cloud computing system integrator space by bringing in various innovative solutions and lead successful cloud adoption for our customers.

CSS Corp is declared as the Winner of the Top 100 CISO Awards 2011. This means you have some specific information security related practices. Data Security & Privacy is a big concern for the Cloud hosted applications. How are you addressing this concern?

Yes, of course it is a big concern for our customers too. The way we handle security in general is by proactively deploying security measures such as IDS/IPS, Data Encryption, Backup, DR...etc for our customers. CSS Corp's innovative Cloud Enablement solution assures that the customer's information is protected to the maximum possible extent and to minimize the downtime of their application by the means of cloud deployment automation.

The year 2011 has witnessed almost all the big names failing in their services during a particular point in time. That resulted in major cloud outages like Amazon Web Services, Gmail, Microsoft's BPOS, Intuit, VMware Cloud Foundry etc. How reliable is the cloud?

Cloud Computing preaches Design For Failure and I believe it is fair to accept that anything in this world can and will fail. Having given an option to automate in the cloud computing technology paradigm, we should always make sure we are able to sustain the failures by devising proper DR strategies that are automated to a great extent. Cloud computing as a technology is more reliable but we need to make sure the solution providers are implementing in the right way. As a cloud computing consumer, we should make sure that the required SLA's are met by the provider.

Students and fresher engineers are looking for a career in cloud computing. Where and how should they start?

I would say, cloud computing (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) is nothing but, a highly automated efficient data center providing self services based access to IT resources such as computing, storage, network, platform, applications and its related security. Students & Freshers should be learning cloud computing technology as an advancement of what they learn today rather than treating it as a separate subject. As a CSR activity at CSS Corp, under the banner of our Contributor Program, we provide a platform for fresh graduates to experiment with cloud technologies and add value to our existing solutions portfolio. My strong suggestion for the students would be to understand the basics in computer science in terms of networks, storage, computing, programming languages...etc thoroughly to excel themselves in the new computing arena.

Thanks you Ezhil for sharing your views with Techno-Pulse readers. Good Luck to you & CSS Corp team for future endeavors.

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