Cloud Computing

An Introduction
Topics to be discussed
Cloud computing at a glance

● The vision of cloud computing

● Defining a cloud.
● The cloud computing reference model
● Characteristics and benefits
● Challenges ahead

Historical developments

● Distributed systems
● Virtualization
● Web 2.0
● Service-oriented computing
● Utility-oriented computing
Vision of cloud
computing
The vision of cloud computing

Computing is being transformed into a model consisting of services that are commoditized and
delivered in a manner similar to utilities such as water, electricity, gas, and telephony.

Cloud computing is a technological advancement that focuses on the way we design computing
systems, develop applications, and leverage existing services for building software. It is based on
the concept of dynamic provisioning, which is applied not only to services but also to compute
capability, storage, networking, and information technology (IT) infrastructure in general.

Resources are made available through the Internet and offered on a pay-per-use basis from cloud
computing vendors.

Today anyone with a credit card can subscribe to cloud services and deploy and configure servers
for an application in hours, growing and shrinking the infrastructure serving its application
according to the demand, and paying only for the time these resources have been used.
Vision of Cloud Computing

Figure 1: A vision of cloud computing marketplace

Hindrances for Cloud/Features of cloud

Hindrances for Cloud

Restricted to single service or a group of services

Lack of effective standardization

Features of cloud
Ubiquitous storage and compute power on demand

Scalable runtime for applications ( one to many processor ) and system developers

Availability of web based access to documents and their processing using

sophisticated applications
The results of cloud computing

No technical infrastructure at the service consumer side.

Lead to a greener world by reducing waste of energy and carbon emissions

Data centres serve multiple users can be optimized for minimal power/compute
requirements
Cloud computing - bag of words

Figure 2: Terms used frequently in cloud computing literature

Define a cloud
Cloud-definition

A cloud is a type of parallel and distributed system consisting of a collection of

interconnected and virtualized computers that are dynamically provisioned and presented
as one or more unified computing resources based on service-level agreements
established through negotiation between the service provider and consumers
Cloud Computing - definition

“Cloud computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the
hardware and system software in the data centers that provide those services.”

“Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a
shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications,
and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or
service provider interaction”

Another important aspect of cloud computing is its utility-oriented approach. More than any
other trend in distributed computing, cloud computing focuses on delivering services with a given
pricing model, in most cases a “pay-per-use” strategy. It makes it possible to access online
storage, rent virtual hardware, or use development platforms and pay only for their effective
usage, with no or minimal up-front costs. All these operations can be performed and billed simply
by entering the credit card details and accessing the exposed services through a Web browser
Some possibilities- delegate work to cloud

Large enterprises can offload some of their activities to cloud-based systems.

Small enterprises and start-ups can afford to translate their ideas into business results
more quickly, without excessive up-front costs.

System developers can concentrate on the business logic rather than dealing with the
complexity of infrastructure management and scalability.

End users can have their documents accessible from everywhere and any device.
Birds eye view of cloud computing

Figure 3: A birds eye view of cloud computing

Cloud computing
deployment models
Cloud Computing Deployment models
The three major models for deploying and accessing cloud computing environments are

● public clouds
● private/enterprise clouds
● hybrid clouds.

Public clouds are the most common deployment models in which necessary IT infrastructure (e.g.,
virtualized datacenters) is established by a third-party service provider that makes it available to any
consumer on a subscription basis. Such clouds are appealing to users because they allow users to
quickly leverage compute, storage, and application services. In this environment, users’ data and
applications are deployed on cloud datacenters on the vendor’s premises.

Large organizations that own massive computing infrastructures can still benefit from cloud
computing by replicating the cloud IT service delivery model in-house. This idea has given birth to
the concept of private clouds as opposed to public clouds.Institutions such as governments and
banks that have high security, privacy, and regulatory concerns prefer to build and use their own
private or enterprise clouds. Example US federal government had created a private cloud for itself.
Cloud Computing Deployment models

Whenever private cloud resources are unable to meet users’ quality-of-service requirements,
hybrid computing systems, partially composed of public cloud resources and privately owned
infrastructures, are created to serve the organization’s needs. These are often referred as hybrid
clouds, which are becoming a common way for many stakeholders to start exploring the
possibilities offered by cloud computing
Cloud deployment models

Figure 4: Cloud deployment models

Cloud Service Models/ Cloud
reference model
 Cloud service models
Cloud computing services offerings can be classified into three major categories:

● Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
● Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
● Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

At the base of the stack, Infrastructure-as-a-Service solutions deliver infrastructure on demand in

the form of virtual hardware, storage, and networking. Virtual hardware is utilized to provide compute
on demand in the form of virtual machine instances. These are created at users’ request on the
provider’s infrastructure, and users are given tools and interfaces to configure the software stack
installed in the virtual machine.

The pricing model is usually defined in terms of dollars per hour, where the hourly cost is influenced
by the characteristics of the virtual hardware. Virtual storage is delivered in the form of raw disk
space or object store. The former complements a virtual hardware offering that requires persistent
storage. The latter is a more high-level abstraction for storing entities rather than files. Virtual
networking identifies the collection of services that manage the networking among virtual instances
and their connectivity to the Internet or private networks.
Cloud service models

Platform-as-a-Service solutions are the next step in the stack. They deliver scalable and elastic runtime
environments on demand and host the execution of applications. These services are backed by a core
middleware platform that is responsible for creating the abstract environment where applications are
deployed and executed. It is the responsibility of the service provider to provide scalability and to
manage fault tolerance, while users are requested to focus on the logic of the application developed by
leveraging the provider’s APIs and libraries. This approach increases the level of abstraction at which
cloud computing is leveraged but also constrains the user in a more controlled environment.

At the top of the stack, Software-as-a-Service solutions provide applications and services on demand.
Most of the common functionalities of desktop applications—such as office automation, document
management, photo editing, and customer relationship management (CRM) software—are
replicated on the provider’s infrastructure and made more scalable and accessible through a browser on
demand. These applications are shared across multiple users whose interaction is isolated from the other
users. The SaaS layer is also the area of social networking Websites, which leverage cloud-based
infrastructures to sustain the load generated by their popularity
 Cloud computing reference model

Figure 5: Cloud computing reference model

History and evolution of computing

Figure 6: A history of computing

Characteristics of cloud
Characteristics of Cloud computing

Cloud computing has some interesting characteristics that bring benefits to both cloud
service consumers (CSCs) and cloud service providers (CSPs). These characteristics are:

● No up-front commitments
● On-demand access
● Nice pricing
● Simplified application acceleration and scalability
● Efficient resource allocation
● Energy efficiency
● Seamless creation and use of third-party services
Benefits of using Cloud

It converts the capital cost ( investment on IT infrastructure) to utility cost ( pay for IT
infra as far as you use it).Maintenance costs are significantly reduced.

Increased agility in defining and structuring software systems

End users can benefit from cloud computing by having their data and the capability of
operating on it always available, from anywhere, at any time, and through multiple
devices.
History of computing
History of Cloud Computing

The five core technologies that played an important role in the realization of cloud
computing. These technologies are

1. Distributed systems,
2. Virtualization,
3. Web 2.0,
4. Service orientation,
5. Utility computing.
History of Cloud Computing
1. Distributed systems

A distributed system is a collection of independent computers that appears to its users as a

single coherent system. Distributed systems often exhibit other properties such as
heterogeneity, openness, scalability, transparency, concurrency, continuous availability, and
resilience to independent failures. Three major milestones have led to cloud computing:
mainframe computing, cluster computing, and grid computing.

Mainframes. These were the first examples of large computational facilities leveraging
multiple processing units presented as a single entity to users.

Clusters. Cluster computing started as a low-cost alternative to the use of mainframes and
supercomputers. These machines could then be connected by a high-bandwidth network and
controlled by specific software tools that manage them as a single system. Examples of
computing are Condor, Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) , and Message Passing Interface
(MPI) .
History of Cloud Computing

Grids. Grid computing appeared in the early 1990s as an evolution of cluster computing. In an
analogy to the power grid, grid computing proposed a new approach to access large
computational power, huge storage facilities, and a variety of services. Users can “consume”
resources in the same way as they use other utilities such as power, gas, and water. Grids
initially developed as aggregations of geographically dispersed clusters by means of internet
connections. These clusters belonged to different organizations, and arrangements were made
among them to share the computational power.
History of Cloud Computing
2. Virtualization

Virtualization is another core technology for cloud computing. Virtualization confers that
degree of customization and control that makes cloud computing appealing for users and, at
the same time, sustainable for cloud services providers. Virtualization is essentially a
technology that allows creation of different computing environments.

These environments are called virtual because they simulate the interface that is expected by a
guest. The most common example of virtualization is hardware virtualization. This
technology allows simulating the hardware interface expected by an operating system.
Hardware virtualization allows the coexistence of different software stacks on top of the
same hardware. These stacks are contained inside virtual machine instances, which operate in
complete isolation from each other.
History of Cloud Computing

High-performance servers can host several virtual machine instances, thus creating the
opportunity to have a customized software stack on demand. This is the base technology that
enables cloud computing solutions to deliver virtual servers on demand, such as Amazon
EC2, RightScale, VMware vCloud, and others. Together with hardware virtualization,
storage and network virtualization complete the range of technologies for the emulation of IT
infrastructure.

Virtualization technologies are also used to replicate runtime environments for programs.
Applications in the case of process virtual machines (which include the foundation of
technologies such as Java or .NET), instead of being executed by the operating system, are run
by a specific program called a virtual machine. This technique allows isolating the execution of
applications and providing a finer control on the resource they access.
History of Cloud Computing

Process virtual machines offer a higher level of abstraction with respect to hardware
virtualization, since the guest is only constituted by an application rather than a complete
software stack. This approach is used in cloud computing to provide a platform for
scaling applications on demand, such as Google AppEngine and Windows Azure.
History of Cloud Computing

3. Web 2.0
Web 2.0 brings interactivity and flexibility into web pages, providing enhanced user experience
by gaining Web-based access to all the functions that are normally found in desktop
applications. These capabilities are obtained by integrating a collection of standards and
technologies such as XML, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), Web Services, and
others. These technologies allow us to build applications leveraging the contribution of users,
who now become providers of content. Examples of Web 2.0 applications are Google
Documents, Google Maps, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, de.li.cious, Blogger, and
Wikipedia.
History of Cloud Computing

4. Service-oriented computing-
service-oriented computing (SOC) supports the development of rapid, low-cost, flexible,
interoperable, and evolvable applications and systems. A service is an abstraction representing
a self-describing and platform-agnostic component that can perform any function—anything
from a simple function to a complex business process. Virtually any piece of code that
performs a task can be turned into a service and expose its functionalities through a network-
accessible protocol.

Loose coupling allows services to serve different scenarios more easily and makes them
reusable. Independence from a specific platform increases services accessibility.
History of Cloud Computing

Thus, a wider range of clients, which can look up services in global registries and consume
them in a location-transparent manner, can be served. Services are composed and
aggregated into a service-oriented architecture (SOA), which is a logical way of
organizing software systems to provide end users or other entities distributed over the
network with services through published and discoverable interfaces.

Service-oriented computing introduces and diffuses two important concepts. Quality of

service (QoS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
History of Cloud Computing

Quality of service (QoS) identifies a set of functional and nonfunctional attributes that can be
used to evaluate the behavior of a service from different perspectives. These could be
performance metrics such as response time, or security attributes, transactional integrity,
reliability, scalability, and availability. QoS requirements are established between the client and
the provider via an SLA that identifies the minimum values (or an acceptable range) for the
QoS attributes that need to be satisfied upon the service call.

The concept of Software-as-a-Service introduces a new delivery model for applications. The
term has been inherited from the world of application service providers (ASPs), which
deliver software services-based solutions across the wide area network(WAN) from a
central datacenter and make them available on a subscription or rental basis. The SaaS
approach reaches its full development with service-oriented computing (SOC), where loosely
coupled software components can be exposed and priced singularly, rather than entire
applications. This allows the delivery of complex business processes and transactions as a
service while allowing applications to be composed on the fly and services to be reused from
everywhere and by anybody.
History of Cloud Computing

Example a tourist web site One of the most popular expressions of service orientation is
represented by Web Services (WS) .Web services are software components that expose
functionalities accessible using a method invocation pattern that goes over the
HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The interface of a Web service can be
programmatically inferred by metadata expressed through the Web Service Description
Language (WSDL) this is an XML language that defines the characteristics of the
service and all the methods, together with parameters, descriptions, and return type,
exposed by the service. Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) This is an XML
language that defines how to invoke a Web service method and collect the result. Using
SOAP and WSDL over HTTP, Web services become platform independent and accessible
to the World Wide Web. Platforms for development are ASP.NET and Axis.
History of Cloud Computing

5. Utility-oriented computing: The idea of providing computing as a utility like natural

gas, water, power, and telephone connection has a long history but has become a reality
today with the advent of cloud computing.

With utility computing accessible on a wider scale, it is easier to provide a trading

infrastructure where grid products—storage, computation, and services—are bid for or
sold. Moreover, e-commerce technologies provided the infrastructure support for utility
computing. In the late 1990s, a significant interest in buying any kind of goods online
spread to the wider public: food, clothes, multimedia products, and online services such
as storage space and web hosting. infrastructures for online payment using credit cards
become easily accessible and well proven.
******** End of Chapter 1
*********