Cloud computing has become the most sought after technology offering. Yahoo! Inc, one of the largest private cloud computing platform providers and adopters, sees it as fundamental to creating a richer experience for its users. One of the largest contributors to Hadoop – an Apache project being built and used by a global community of contributors, using the Java programming language – Yahoo! has committed to open-sourcing all of its cloud infrastructure. The company, which runs 400,000 machines on the cloud, is planning to make its India research and development unit the centre of excellence for various cloud platforms. Yahoo! Inc Vice-President (Cloud Architecture) Todd Papaioanno speaks with Pradeesh Chandran about the company’s plans in the cloud computing space. Edited excerpts:
Could you elaborate on the role of the Indian research and development (R&D) team in Yahoo! cloud platforms?
Our team in Bangalore forms a critical part of our cloud platforms. Our Indian team has undertaken some cutting-edge projects, especially in the Hadoop platform. Another important team is working on the cloud serving platform and they build serving container. We are establishing Bangalore as a centre of excellence for our cloud platforms.
Yahoo! provides its cloud services platform on open source. Do you think the open source platform will boost the cloud adoption in a country like India where the adoption of virtualisation has been slow?
Virtualisation was part of the story for the cloud. Cloud brings a lot more, like self-service, dynamic reasoning and utility computing. So, I think the benefits of cloud outplay pure virtualisation. And we think the adoption will accelerate. Besides, lot of people who use software-as-a-service do not even realise it.
We have stated publicly that our intention is to use open source for our entire cloud infrastructure. Hadoop is one of the projects in open source and has become a platform for huge data. We have couple of other technologies in our cloud suits that will make use of open source. Though we are one of the largest users of private cloud we don’t have any plan to enter the public cloud business. The benefit of making technology open is that it would help in co-creation of an ecosystem, which is important for a technology like cloud computing. In the last decade, open source was being widely accepted and people were moving very large chunk of their businesses on to open source.
But cloud computing still needs to address some key concerns of users...
We understand that there were a couple of issues and challenges faced by companies in adoption of clouds especially the public cloud. One of the major reasons was security, because for organisations data are critical and you must think about that before putting it on the cloud. The second point was changing the architecture of your legacy systems. When you build an architecture that is running on the public cloud you should look after its capabilities. In spite of these issues one of the benefits of cloud is that firms can actually remove the problems of infrastructure. Now, they can host it somewhere else and can make infrastructure as someone else’s problem and can focus on their core business. The world is adopting cloud as a platform to make their business profitable and green, and is really changing the face of IT. In India we see SMEs and start-ups as major users of cloud platform. To boost the adoption we also conduct various forums for these companies to educate them about the benefits of cloud platforms.
Yahoo! runs its entire business on cloud platform. What are the main objectives of this?
At Yahoo! cloud is the backbone of all our critical business activities. The cloud spans in a multitude of technologies, from infrastructure, storage, data collection, data processing and serving containers, and we put all these together into the engine and we run Yahoo!. Our customers generate over 100 billion events a day across the Yahoo! infrastructure and we process that on our cloud platform. Cloud is behind every click that is happening on Yahoo!.
For us it is fundamental to our business and our open source platform Hadoop plays another big part on how we deliver personal relevance on the web for our end users. We build applications to deliver content that gives personal meanings to our end users. Storage is one part of our operation and we have around 200 petabytes of storage and innovations on cloud.
How has the adoption of cloud helped Yahoo!?
Couple of things, we use Hadoop and cloud to understand our users. We need to deliver compelling and relevant content to our users through the web. Fundamentally, this is what we are trying to bring to the internet. For advertisers, they want to take their advertisement to people who are interested in their products and user understanding is critical to deliver right advertising for our end user.
