Working with iWay on Cloud Nine

By Ravi Ramachandran

Lately, you may have heard terms such as Cloud Computing, SAAS (Software as a Service) and PAAS (Platform as a Service). What does all this mean? Are we now locating our computing centers on top of mountains or in airplanes cruising at 30,000 feet?

Well, not quite. Over the past few decades, from a computing perspective, the word “cloud” has come to indicate the Internet. We thus have computer systems “on premise” (in your corporate LAN) connecting to the Internet Cloud, either for personal use or for corporate services. Usage in prior years has been focused more on Web site-based services, from services to complex applications such as portals, Web mail, online shopping and social networking.

A newer trend has been to use virtual computer systems – computer systems that are not physically present, but implemented using software to duplicate a real machine. This is cost-effective by enabling hosting of multiple virtual machines over a smaller set of actual hardware. Cloud computing, to simplify, is an extension of this by making virtual computer systems available on the Internet. You have a complete computer system with the operating system of your choice at your disposal, and you can configure this system as required, including the software of your choice.

There are different offerings from companies such as Amazon, Rackspace and Microsoft Azure that allow the customer the flexibility of paying only for the actual usage of the machines on an hourly basis, and also the ability to scale up and down the resources required almost instantaneously based on the demand from their visitors.
Software as a service (SaaS), also known as “software on demand,” is a model of software deployment over the Internet through which a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service. The customer pays for the service either through a time subscription or a “pay-as-you-go” model. Cloud platform services, or Platform as a Service (PaaS), deliver a computing platform and/or solution stack as a service, often consuming cloud infrastructure and sustaining cloud applications. This approach facilitates deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software layers

How does iWay fit into all of this? Cloud computing has thus far been a bit esoteric, with only the hardcore systems administrator actually able to make something useful out of the offerings. We at iWay are trying to simplify the whole process and make it much easier for companies to take advantage of the cloud as well as the range of products that iWay has through a marriage of the two – pre-built iWay images available on the cloud.

Thus, a customer who wants to leverage the power of a virtual machine cost-effectively, as well as with minimal effort, could use one of the iWay Cloud Appliance servers available through Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). iWay has devised solutions based on both SaaS and PaaS, which enable customers to either use software across a single machine shared seamlessly with other customers, or to have a single virtual platform for themselves.

There are many different iWay Cloud Appliances under development to maximize the ROI (Return on Investment) and ROE (Return on Effort) for the customers, such as SalesForce Cloud Appliance, Magnify Cloud Appliance and Data Profiler Cloud Appliance. Below I will outline the contours of the Data Profiler Cloud Appliance.

Any customer can sign up with iWay for the Data Profiler Cloud Appliance. Information Builders customers who aren’t already Amazon customers need to sign up for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. Once that is complete, iWay makes the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) of the Data Profiler Cloud Appliance available to the customer.

This is basically a pre-built computer system that has iWay Data Profiler and all the products on which it is based preinstalled, allowing the user to just do a plug-and-play to start working. Once the appliance has been initiated, the customer can access the Data Profiler service through the Internet from multiple office locations. The different Data Quality profiling information (generated using iWay DQC) can be shared using the Data Profiler Cloud Appliance and viewed by all users in a highly graphical and intuitive manner.

Thus, the advantages of using any of the iWay Cloud Appliances on Amazon EC2 is that the customer not only manages to leverage the full power of the application that is needed (like iWay Data Profiler), but also manages to lower the costs from running it on a known and trusted cloud computing services provider like Amazon, who will ensure there is relatively zero downtime on the system itself. On top of that, the ease and convenience of actually deploying and managing the system, as it is pre-installed, will definitely put the customer on top of the world, literally on a cloud!