We at GTT have already started to think about shifting some IT services to the cloud space so I attended the AWS Summit, one of the largest events in the area of cloud technologies.
During this two-day event on June 6-7, more than four thousand visitors participated in about 100 talks and workshops held by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its partners and customers. They probably took over the idea of the summit from our Users’ Meeting…
GTT attended this event in order to evaluate the possibilities and opportunities to leverage cloud services and the possible migration from the legacy on-premise servers to server-less structures and web services. Many large enterprises have already enabled cloud computing and leverage numerous services offered by cloud computing providers. SAP, BMW Group, Siemens, OTTO, DB, Sage, Avira are only some of the enterprises that became customers of AWS in DACH (Deutschland, Austria & Switzerland).
We are considering to use Amazon S3 and Glacier services for various purposes. An advantage of using the cloud services is the scalability and elasticity. In addition, we would not need to worry about new security patches, and we can focus primarily on storing, developing and building. Due to geographically redundant servers, the high availability of the data is guaranteed. Outages are rare events that luckily only seem to happen in the week of the year that connects February and March and last only a few hours.
That is our perspective as an SME on how the cloud might change our IT infrastructure. Will the cloud also change the way we interact with our customers?
This question leads us to another perspective of the Cloud Enablement which is “ChemApp Cloud”. We have already introduced several interfaces for ChemApp such as for C/C++, Java, Python, VB, Delphi and Lazarus. The next step could be a cloud interface. One solution would be that the ChemApp engine is placed on the AWS EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud), and client programs send their requests by an HTTP method via RESTful API to the ChemApp engine. The calculation is executed on the cloud, and the result is sent back to the client side. By doing so, users do not need to have any powerful local resources, because the calculations are performed in the cloud. Thus, one can easily and quickly run complicated calculations on tablets and even smartphones!
What do you think about this objective? How practical and effective do you find it? Where do you see the potential of a “ChemApp Cloud”? We are always happy to know your feedback and comments about GTT’s approaches and practices to improve and expand our services.
By the way, a good reason that could explain why GTT should be cloudy is that because Aachen is mostly cloudy!