CLOUD COMPUTING

INTRODUCTION
Cloud computing is a term used to describe both a platform and type of application. A cloud computing
platform dynamically provisions, configures, reconfigures, and deprovisions servers as needed. Servers in
the cloud can be physical machines or virtual machines. Advanced clouds typically include other
computing resources such as storage area networks (SANs), network equipment, firewall and other
security devices.

Cloud computing also describes applications that are extended to be accessible through the Internet.
These cloud applications use large data centers and powerful servers that host Web applications and Web
services. Anyone with a suitable Internet connection and a standard browser can access a cloud
application.

A cloud is a pool of virtualized computer resources. A cloud can host a variety of different workloads,
including batch-style back-end jobs and interactive, user-facing applications, allow workloads to be
deployed and scaled-out quickly through the rapid provisioning of virtual machines or physical machines,
support redundant, self-recovering, highly scalable programming models that allow, workloads to recover
from many unavoidable hardware/software failures, monitor resource use in real time to enable
rebalancing of allocations when needed

Cloud computing environments support grid computing by quickly providing physical and virtual servers
on which the grid applications can run. Cloud computing should not be confused with grid computing.
Grid computing involves dividing a large task into many smaller tasks that run in parallel on separate
servers. Grids require many computers, typically in the thousands, and commonly use servers, desktops,
and laptops.

Clouds also support non-grid environments, such as a three-tier Web architecture running standard or
Web 2.0 applications. A cloud is more than a collection of computer resources because a cloud provides a
mechanism to manage those resources. Management includes provisioning, change requests, reimaging,
workload rebalancing, deprovisioning, and monitoring.

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 HISTORY
The underlying concept of cloud computing dates back to the 1960s, when John McCarthy opined that
"computation may someday be organized as a public utility." Almost all the modern-day characteristics of
cloud computing (elastic provision, provided as a utility, online, illusion of infinite supply), the
comparison to the electricity industry and the use of public, private, government and community forms
was thoroughly explored in Douglas Parkhill's 1966 book, The Challenge of the Computer Utility.

The actual term "cloud" borrows from telephony in that telecommunications companies, who until the
1990s primarily offered dedicated point-to-point data circuits, began offering Virtual Private
Network (VPN) services with comparable quality of service but at a much lower cost. By switching
traffic to balance utilization as they saw fit, they were able to utilize their overall network bandwidth
more effectively. The cloud symbol was used to denote the demarcation point between that which was the
responsibility of the provider from that of the user. Cloud computing extends this boundary to cover
servers as well as the network infrastructure. The first scholarly use of the term “cloud computing” is in a
1997 lecture by Ramnath Chellappa.

Amazon played a key role in the development of cloud computing by modernizing their data centers after
the dot-com bubble, which, like most computer networks, were using as little as 10% of their capacity at
any one time, just to leave room for occasional spikes. Having found that the new cloud architecture
resulted in significant internal efficiency improvements whereby small, fast-moving "two-pizza teams"
could add new features faster and easier, Amazon initiated a new product development effort to provide
cloud computing to external customers, and launched Amazon Web Service (AWS) on a utility
computing basis in 2006.

In 2007, Google, IBM and a number of universities embarked on a large scale cloud computing research

project. In early 2008, Eucalyptus became the first open source AWS API compatible platform for
deploying private clouds. By mid-2008, Gartner saw an opportunity for cloud computing "to shape the
relationship among consumers of IT services, those who use IT services and those who sell them" and
observed that "organizations are switching from company-owned hardware and software assets to per-use
service-based models" so that the "projected shift to cloud computing ... will result in dramatic growth in
IT products in some areas and significant reductions in other areas."

In March 2010, Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer, made his strongest statement of betting the company's
future in the cloud by proclaiming, "For the cloud, we're all in" and further stating, "About 75 percent of
our folks are doing entirely cloud based or entirely cloud inspired; a year from now that will be 90
percent."

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 OBJECTIVES
Adopting a cloud computing strategy can help businesses conduct their core business activities with less
hassle and greater efficiency. Companies can maximize the use of their existing hardware to plan for and
serve specific peaks in usage. Thousands of virtual machines and applications can be managed more
easily using a cloud-like environment.
Businesses can also save on power costs as they reduce the number of servers required. And with IT staff
spending less time managing and monitoring the data centre, IT teams are well placed to further
streamline their operations as staff complete more work on fewer machines.

TYPES OF CLOUD
Cloud providers typically centre on one type of cloud functionality provisioning: Infrastructure, Platform
or Software / Application, though there is potentially no restriction to offer multiple types at the same
time, which can often be observed in PaaS (Platform as a Service) providers which offer specific
applications too, such as Google App Engine in combination with Google Docs. Due this combinatorial
capability, these types are also often referred to as “components”.

Literature and publications typically differ slightly in the terminologies applied. This is mostly due to the
fact that some application areas overlap and are therefore difficult to distinguish. As an example,
platforms typically have to provide access to resources indirectly, and thus are sometimes confused with
infrastructures. Additionally, more popular terms have been introduced in less technologically centered
publications.

The following list identifies the main types of clouds (currently in use):

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

(Cloud) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) also referred to as Resource Clouds, provide (managed and
scalable) resources as services to the user – in other words, they basically provide enhanced virtualization
capabilities. Accordingly, different resources may be provided via a service interface:
Data & Storage Clouds deal with reliable access to data of potentially dynamic size, weighing resource
usage with access requirements and / or quality definition.

Examples: Amazon S3, SQL Azure.

Compute Clouds provide access to computational resources, i.e. CPUs. So far, such low-level resources
cannot really be exploited on their own, so that they are typically exposed as part of a “virtualized
environment” (not to be mixed with PaaS below), i.e. hypervisors. Compute Cloud Providers therefore
typically offer the capability to provide computing resources (i.e. raw access to resources unlike PaaS that
offer full software stacks to develop and build applications), typically virtualized, in which to execute
cloudified services and applications. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) offers additional capabilities over a
simple compute service.

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Examples: Amazon EC2, Zimory, Elastichosts.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Platform as a Service (PaaS), provide computational resources via a platform upon which applications
and services can be developed and hosted. PaaS typically makes use of dedicated APIs to control the
behavior of a server hosting engine which executes and replicates the execution according to user requests
(e.g. access rate). As each provider exposes his / her own API according to the respective key capabilities,
applications developed for one specific cloud provider cannot be moved to another cloud host – there are
however attempts to extend generic programming models with cloud capabilities (such as MS Azure).

Examples: Force.com, Google App Engine, Windows Azure (Platform).

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Software as a Service (SaaS), also sometimes referred to as Service or Application Clouds are offering
implementations of specific business functions and business processes that are provided with specific
cloud capabilities, i.e. they provide applications / services using a cloud infrastructure or platform, rather
than providing cloud features themselves. Often, kind of standardapplication software functionality is
offered within a cloud.

Examples: Google Docs, Salesforce CRM, SAP Business by Design.

Overall, Cloud Computing is not restricted to Infrastructure / Platform / Software as a Service systems,
even though it provides enhanced capabilities which act as (vertical) enablers to these systems. As such,
I/P/SaaS can be considered specific “usage patterns” for cloud systems which relate to models already
approached by Grid, Web Services etc. Cloud systems are a promising way to implement these models
and extend them further.

DEPLOYMENT TYPES (CLOUD

USAGE)
Similar to P/I/SaaS, clouds may be hosted and employed in different fashions, depending on the use case,
respectively the business model of the provider. So far, there has been a tendency of clouds to evolve
from private, internal solutions (private clouds) to manage the local infrastructure and the amount of
requests e.g. to ensure availability of highly requested data. This is due to the fact that data centers
initiating cloud capabilities made use of these features for internal purposes before considering selling the
capabilities publicly (public clouds). Only now that the providers have gained confidence in publication
and exposition of cloud features do the first hybrid solutions emerge. This movement from private via
public to combined solutions is often considered a “natural” evolution of such systems, though there is no
reason for providers to not start up with hybrid solutions, once the necessary technologies have reached a
mature enough position.

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We can hence distinguish between the following deployment types:

Public cloud

Public cloud or external cloud describes cloud computing in the traditional mainstream sense, whereby
resources are dynamically provisioned on a fine-grained, self-service basis over the Internet, via web
applications/web services, from an off-site third-party provider who bills on a fine-grained utility
computing basis.

Example: Amazon, Google Apps, Windows Azure.

Community Cloud

A community cloud may be established where several organizations have similar requirements and seek
to share infrastructure so as to realize some of the benefits of cloud computing. With the costs spread over
fewer users than a public cloud (but more than a single tenant) this option is more expensive but may
offer a higher level of privacy, security and/or policy compliance. Examples of community
cloud include Google's "Gov Cloud".

Hybrid Cloud

There is some confusion over the term "Hybrid" when applied to the cloud - a standard definition of the
term "Hybrid Cloud" has not yet emerged. The term "Hybrid Cloud" has been used to mean either two
separate clouds joined together (public, private, internal or external), or a combination of virtualized
cloud server instances used together with real physical hardware. The most correct definition of the term
"Hybrid Cloud" is probably the use of physical hardware and virtualized cloud server instances together
to provide a single common service. Two clouds that have been joined together are more correctly called
a "combined cloud".

A combined cloud environment consisting of multiple internal and/or external providers” will be typical
for most enterprises".  By integrating multiple cloud services users may be able to ease the transition
to public cloud services while avoiding issues such as PCI compliance.

Another perspective on deploying a web application in the cloud is using Hybrid Web Hosting, where the
hosting infrastructure is a mix between Cloud Hosting and Managed dedicated servers - this is most
commonly achieved as part of a web cluster in which some of the nodes are running on real physical
hardware and some are running on cloud server instances.

A hybrid storage cloud uses a combination of public and private storage clouds. Hybrid storage clouds are
often useful for archiving and backup functions, allowing local data to be replicated to a public cloud. [65]

Private Cloud

Douglas Parkhill first described the concept of a "Private Computer Utility" in his 1966 book The
Challenge of the Computer Utility. The idea was based upon direct comparison with other industries (e.g.
the electricity industry) and the extensive use of hybrid supply models to balance and mitigate risks.

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Private cloud and internal cloud have been described as neologisms, however the concepts themselves
pre-date the term cloud by 40 years. Even within modern utility industries, hybrid models still exist
despite the formation of reasonably well-functioning markets and the ability to combine multiple
providers.

Some vendors have used the terms to describe offerings that emulate cloud computing on private
networks. These (typically virtualization automation) products offer the ability to deliver some benefits of
cloud computing whilst mitigating some of the pitfalls. These offerings capitalize on data security,
corporate governance, and reliability concerns during this time of transition from a product to a
functioning service-based industry supported by competitive marketplaces.

Private clouds have attracted criticism because users "still have to buy, build, and manage them" and thus
do not benefit from lower up-front capital costs and less hands-on management, essentially “the economic
model that makes cloud computing such an intriguing concept".

Example: eBay.

Special Purpose Clouds

In particular IaaS clouds originating from data centers have a “general purpose” appeal to them, as their
according capabilities can be equally used for a wide scope of use cases and customer types. As opposed
to this, PaaS clouds tend to provide functionalities more specialized to specific use cases, which should
not be confused with “proprietariness” of the platform: specialization implies providing additional, use
case specific methods, whilst proprietary data implies that structure of data and interface are specific to
the provider.

Specialized functionalities are provided e.g. by the Google App Engine which provides specific
capabilities dedicated to distributed document management. Similar to general service provisioning (web
based or not), it can be expected that future systems will provide even more specialized capabilities to
attract individual user areas, due to competition, customer demand and available expertise.

Special Purpose Clouds are just extensions of “normal” cloud systems to provide additional, dedicated
capabilities. The basis of such development is already visible.

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 Architecture

When talking about a cloud computing system, it's helpful to divide it into two sections: the front end and
the back end. They connect to each other through a network, usually the Internet. The front end is the
side the computer user, or client, sees. The back end is the "cloud" section of the system.

The front end includes the client's computer (or computer network) and the application required to access
the cloud computing system. Not all cloud computing systems have the same user interface. Services like
Web-based e-mail programs leverage existing Web browsers like Internet Explorer or Firefox. Other
systems have unique applications that provide network access to clients.

On the back end of the system are the various computers, servers and data storage systems that create
the "cloud" of computing services. In theory, a cloud computing system could include practically any
computer program you can imagine, from data processing to video games. Usually, each application will
have its own dedicated server.

A central server administers the system, monitoring traffic and client demands to ensure everything runs
smoothly. It follows a set of rules called protocols and uses a special kind of software called middleware.
Middleware allows networked computers to communicate with each other.

If a cloud computing company has a lot of clients, there's likely to be a high demand for a lot of storage
space. Some companies require hundreds of digital storage devices. Cloud computing systems need at
least twice the number of storage devices it requires to keep all its clients' information stored. That's
because these devices, like all computers, occasionally break down. A cloud computing system must
make a copy of all its clients' information and store it on other devices. The copies enable the central
server to access backup machines to retrieve data that otherwise would be unreachable. Making copies
of data as a backup is called redundancy.

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