. Cloud computing environments support grid computing by quickly providing physical andvirtual servers on which the grid applications can run. Cloud computing is different from gridcomputing because Grid Computing involves dividing a large task into many smaller tasks thatrun in parallel on separate servers. Grids require many computers, typically in the thousands, andcommonly use servers, desktops, and laptops. Clouds also support nongrid environments, such asa three-tier Web architecture running standard or Web 2.0 applications. A cloud is more than acollection of computer resources because a cloud provides a mechanism to manage thoseresources. Management includes provisioning, change requests, reimaging, workloadrebalancing, deprovisioning, and monitoring.
The Cloud Platform
One of the most important parts of cloud computing technique is the advent of
cloud platforms
.As its name suggests, this kind of platform allows developers to write applications that run in thecloud, or use services provided from the cloud, or both. It is also known as
on-demand platform
and
platform as a service (PaaS)
. The difference between how application platforms are usedtoday and cloud platforms is that when a development team creates an on-premises application(i.e., one that will run within an organization), it only needs to write a source-code in some programming language. If the creators of every on-premises application first had to build all of the basics that is, right from the OS which supports the program to the assembler which decodesthe program, then we’d have many fewer applications today. Similarly, if every developmentteam that wishes to create a cloud application must first build its own cloud platform, we won’tsee many cloud applications. Fortunately, a number of cloud platform technologies are availabletoday. In this essay, we categorize and briefly describe those technologies as they’re seen bysomeone who creates enterprise.
Cloud Computing in ITES
In cloud computing, massively scalable IT-enabled capabilities are provided “as a service” tomultiple customers. Unlike previous IT licensing models, however, these ‘services’ are typically billed on a consumption basis. Cloud computing is often associated with new Web 2.0 start-upcompanies. The best known Cloud application is the Google Search engine that, whileconsuming huge amounts of processing power, never needs to rely on database ACID rules or two-phase commits. Nevertheless, Cloud computing is extremely attractive to traditional IT inthe way that it can convert the consumptive model of IT resources from a capital expendituremodel to an operational expenditure model. Instead of building out on-premises datacenters,Cloud offers the ability to soak up excess compute capacity wherever it may lie. After all, it isalways 3am somewhere in the world and finding and using that capacity (as bandwidthconsumption at those times of the day will be minimal) can be very cost effective. Of course, theconsumptive model of controlling costs offered by Cloud computing is nothing new to IBM datacenter managers, and many of the significant trends we are witnessing in the industry today havesome very interesting parallels and precedents in traditional data center evolution.
ARCHITECTURE
As shown in figure 1, Cloud computing infrastructure consists of reliable services deliveredthrough data centers and built on servers with different levels of virtualization technologies. The
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