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Introduction to Cloud Computing

Anonymous User4542 25-Feb-2015

When you store your photos online instead of on your home computer, or use webmail or a social networking site, you are using a “cloud computing” service. If you are an organization, and you want to use, for example, an online invoicing service instead of updating the in-house one you have been using for many years, that online invoicing service is a “cloud computing” service. Cloud computing refers to the delivery of computing resources over the Internet. Instead of keeping data on your own hard drive or updating applications for your needs, you use a service over the Internet, at another location, to store your information or use its applications. 

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing means that instead of all the computer hardware and software you're using sitting on your desktop, or somewhere inside your company's network, it's provided for you as a service by another company and accessed over the Internet, usually in a completely seamless way. Exactly where the hardware and software is located and how it all works doesn't matter to you, the user—it's just somewhere up in the nebulous "cloud" that the Internet represents. 

Cloud computing is a buzzword that means different things to different people. For some, it's just another way of describing IT (information technology) "outsourcing"; others use it to mean any computing service provided over the Internet or a similar network; and some define it as any bought-in computer service you use that sits outside your firewall. 

Characteristics: 

It’s managed

Most importantly, the service you use is provided by someone else and managed on your behalf. If you're using Google Documents, you don't have to worry about buying umpteen licenses for word-processing software or keeping them up-to-date. Nor do you have to worry about viruses that might affect your computer or about backing up the files you create. Google does all that for you. One basic principle of cloud computing is that you no longer need to worry how the service you're buying is provided: with Web-based services, you simply concentrate on whatever your job is and leave the problem of providing dependable computing to someone else

It’s “On- Demand”

Cloud services are available on-demand and often bought on a "pay-as-you go" or subscription basis. So you typically buy cloud computing the same way you'd buy electricity, telephone services, or Internet access from a utility company. Sometimes cloud computing is free or paid-for in other ways (Hotmail is subsidized by advertising, for example). Just like electricity, you can buy as much or as little of a cloud computing service as you need from one day to the next. That's great if your needs vary unpredictably: it means you don't have to buy your own gigantic computer system and risk have it sitting there doing nothing. 

It’s public or private

Now we all have PCs on our desks, we're used to having complete control over our computer systems—and complete responsibility for them as well. Cloud computing changes all that. It comes in two basic flavors, public and private, which are the cloud equivalents of the Internet and Intranets. Web-based email and free services like the ones Google provides are the most familiar examples of public clouds. The world's biggest online retailer, Amazon, became the world's largest provider of public cloud computing in early 2006. When it found it was using only a fraction of its huge, global, computing power, it started renting out its spare capacity over the Net through a new entity called Amazon Web Services. Private cloud computing works in much the same way but you access the resources you use through secure network connections, much like an Intranet. Companies such as Amazon also let you use their publicly accessible cloud to make your own secure private cloud, known as a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), using virtual private network (VPN) connections.

Multitenancy

It enables sharing of resources and costs across a large pool of users thus allowing for:

·         Centralization of infrastructure in locations with lower costs (such as real estate, electricity, etc.)

·         peak-load capacity increases (users need not engineer for highest possible load-levels)

·        utilization and efficiency improvements for systems that are often only 10–20% utilized 

Scalability and elasticity

Via dynamic ("on-demand") provisioning of resources on a fine-grained, self-service basis in near real-time (Note, the VM startup time varies by VM type, location, OS and cloud providers), without users having to engineer for peak loads 

Services Models (Levels of Cloud Computing): 

IT people talk about three different kinds of cloud computing, where different services are being provided for you. Note that there's a certain amount of vagueness about how these things are defined and some overlap between them.

 

 Introduction to Cloud Computing

·      Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) means you're buying access to raw computing hardware over the Net, such as servers or storage. Since you buy what you need and pay-as-you-go, this is often referred to as utility computing. Ordinary web hosting is a simple example of IaaS: you pay a monthly subscription or a per-megabyte/gigabyte fee to have a hosting company serve up files for your website from their servers.

·        Software as a Service (SaaS) means you use a complete application running on someone else's system. Web-based email and Google Documents are perhaps the best-known examples. Zoho is another well-known SaaS provider offering a variety of office applications online.

·         Platform as a Service (PaaS) means you develop applications using Web-based tools so they run on systems software and hardware provided by another company. So, for example, you might develop your own ecommerce website but have the whole thing, including the shopping cart, checkout, and payment mechanism running on a merchant's server. Force.com (from salesforce.com) and the Google App Engine are examples of PaaS. 

Pros and Cons of Cloud computing: 

Pros

·         Lower upfront costs and reduced infrastructure costs.

·        Easy to grow your applications.

·        Scale up or down at short notice.

·        Only pay for what you use.

·         Everything managed under SLAs.

·         Overall environmental benefit (lower carbon emissions) of many users efficiently sharing large systems. 

Cons

·         Higher ongoing operating costs. Could cloud systems work out more expensive?

·         Greater dependency on service providers. Can you get problems resolved quickly, even with SLAs?

·         Risk of being locked into proprietary or vendor-recommended systems? How easily can you migrate to another system or service provider if you need to?

·         What happens if your supplier suddenly decides to stop supporting a product or system you've come to depend on?

·        Potential privacy and security risks of putting valuable data on someone else's system in an unknown location?

·         If lots of people migrate to the cloud, where they're no longer free to develop neat and whizzy new things, what does that imply for the future development of the Internet?

·         Dependency on a reliable Internet connection.

 

 

 


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