Cloud computing

INTRODUCTION

Definition: Cloud computing is a term that applies to applications and data storage that are delivered over the Internet or via wireless technology. The individual user's device (i.e. computer, cell phone, etc.)

Cloud computing is a phrase used to describe a variety of computing concepts that involve a large number of computers connected through a real-time communication network such as the Internet.^[1] In science, cloud computing is a synonym for distributed computing over a network, and means the ability to run a program or application on many connected computers at the same time.
The phrase is often used in reference to network-based services, which appear to be provided by real server hardware, and are in fact served up by virtual hardware, simulated by software running on one or more real machines. Such virtual servers do not physically exist and can therefore be moved around and scaled up or down on the fly without affecting the end user, somewhat like a cloud.

In common usage, the term "the cloud" is essentially a metaphor for the Internet.^[2] Marketers have further popularized the phrase "in the cloud" to refer to software, platforms and infrastructure that are sold "as a service", i.e. remotely through the Internet. Typically, the seller has actual energy-consuming servers which host products and services from a remote location, so end-users don't have to; they can simply log on to the network without installing anything. The major models of cloud computing service are known as software as a service, platform as a service, and infrastructure as a service. These cloud services may be offered in a public, private or hybrid network.^[3] Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and Microsoft Azure are some well-known cloud vendors.

The popularity of the term can be attributed to its use in marketing to sell hosted services in the sense of application service provisioning that run client server software on a remote location

.Cloud computing refers to the use of computing resources, those being hardware and/or software) that reside on a remote machine and are delivered to the end user as a service over a network, with the most prevalent example being the internet. By definition, a user entrusts his data to a remote service, on which has limited to no influence.

Security

As cloud computing is achieving increased popularity, concerns are being voiced about the security issues introduced through adoption of this new model.The effectiveness and efficiency of traditional protection mechanisms are being reconsidered as the characteristics of this innovative deployment model can differ widely from those of traditional architectures.

An alternative perspective on the topic of cloud security is that this is but another, although quite broad, case of "applied security" and that similar security principles that apply in shared multi-user mainframe security models apply with cloud security.

access, data segregation, privacy, bug exploitation, recovery, accountability, malicious insiders, management console security, account control, and multi-tenancy issues. Solutions to various cloud security issues vary, from cryptography, particularly public key infrastructure (PKI), to use of multiple cloud providers, standardisation of APIs, and improving virtual machine support and legal support.

The relative security of cloud computing services is a contentious issue that may be delaying its adoption.[133] Physical control of the Private Cloud equipment is more secure than having the equipment off site and under someone else's control. Physical control and the ability to visually inspect data links and access ports is required in order to ensure data links are not compromised. Issues barring the adoption of cloud computing are due in large part to the private and public sectors' unease surrounding the external management of security-based services. It is the very nature of cloud computing-based services, private or public, that promote external management of provided services. This delivers great incentive to cloud computing service providers to prioritize building and maintaining strong management of secure services. Security issues have been categorised into sensitive data

Categories

There are mainly four models of cloud computing:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Network as a Service (Naas)

Advantages

1.Cost Efficiency

This is the biggest advantage of cloud computing, achieved by the elimination of the investment in stand-alone software or servers. By leveraging cloud’s capabilities, companies can save on licensing fees and at the same time eliminate overhead charges such as the cost of data storage, software updates, management etc.

2.Backup and Recovery

The process of backing up and recovering data is simplified since those now reside on the cloud and not on a physical device. The various cloud providers offer reliable and flexible backup/recovery solutions.

3.Increased Storage Capacity

The cloud can accommodate and store much more data compared to a personal computer and in a way offers almost unlimited storage capacity.

4.Smaller learning curve

Cloud applications usually entail smaller learning curves since people are quietly used to them.

Disadvantages

1.Limited control and flexibility

Since the applications and services run on remote, third party virtual environments, companies and users have limited control over the function and execution of the hardware and software.

2.Dependency and vendor lock-in

One of the major disadvantages of cloud computing is the implicit dependency on the provider. This is what the industry calls “vendor lock-in” since it is difficult, and sometimes impossible.

Conclusion

Despite its disadvantages and the fact that it is still in an infant age, cloud computing remains strong and has great potential for the future. Its user base grows constantly and more big players are attracted to it, offering better and more fine tuned services and solutions. We can only hope that the advantages will further grow and the disadvantages will be mitigated, since cloud computing seems to have made IT a little bit easier. Happy cloud computing!

Cloud computing offers benefits for organizations and individuals. There are also

privacy and security concerns. If you are considering a cloud service, you should

think about how your personal information, and that of your customers, can best be

protected. Carefully review the terms of service or contracts, and challenge the

provider to meet your needs.

Benefits

1.Scalability

Your business can scale up or scale down your operation and storage needs quickly to suit your situation, allowing flexibility as your needs change.

2.Business continuity

Protecting your data and systems is an important part of business continuity planning. Whether you experience a natural disaster

3.Access to automatic updates

Access to automatic updates for your IT requirements may be included in your service fee. Depending on your cloud computing service provider

Characteristics

Cloud computing exhibits the following key characteristics:

Agility improves with users' ability to re-provision technological infrastructure resources.
Application programming interface (API) accessibility to software that enables machines to interact with cloud software in the same way that a traditional user interface (e.g., a computer desktop) facilitates interaction between humans and computers. Cloud computing systems typically use Representational State Transfer (REST)-based APIs.

· Virtualization technology allows sharing of servers and storage devices and increased utilization. Applications can be easily migrated from one physical server to another.

· Multitenancy 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)
utilisation and efficiency improvements for systems that are often only 10–20% utilised.

· Reliability improves with the use of multiple redundant sites, which makes well-designed cloud computing suitable for business continuity and disaster recovery.

· Scalability and elasticity via dynamic ("on-demand") provisioning of resources on a fine-grained, self-service basis 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

· Performance is monitored, and consistent and loosely coupled architectures are constructed using web services as the system interface

Maintenance of cloud computing applications is easier, because they do not need to be installed on each user's computer and can be accessed from different places.

Types:-

Private cloud

Private cloud is cloud infrastructure operated solely for a single organization, whether managed internally or by a third-party and hosted internally or externally. Undertaking a private cloud project requires a significant level and degree of engagement to virtualize the business environment, and requires the organization to reevaluate decisions about existing resources. When done right, it can improve business, but every step in the project raises security issues that must be addressed to prevent serious vulnerabilities.Self-run data centers are generally capital intensive. They have a significant physical footprint, requiring allocations of space, hardware, and environmental controls

Public cloud

A cloud is called a "public cloud" when the services are rendered over a network that is open for public use. Technically there may be little or no difference between public and private cloud architecture, however, security consideration may be substantially different for services (applications, storage, and other resources) that are made available by a service provider for a public audience and when communication is effected over a non-trusted network. Generally, public cloud service providers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft and Google own and operate the infrastructure and offer access only via Internet (direct connectivity is not offered).

Community cloud

Community cloud shares infrastructure between several organizations from a specific community with common concerns (security, compliance, jurisdiction, etc.), whether managed internally or by a third-party and hosted internally or externally. The costs are spread over fewer users than a public cloud (but more than a private cloud), so only some of the cost savings potential of cloud computing are realized.

Hybrid cloud

Hybrid cloud is a composition of two or more clouds (private, community or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together, offering the benefits of multiple deployment models. Hybrid cloud can also mean the ability to connect collocation, managed and/or dedicated services with cloud resources.
Gartner, Inc. defines a hybrid cloud service as a cloud computing service that is composed of some combination of private, public and community cloud services, from different service providers.A hybrid cloud service crosses isolation and provider boundaries so that it can’t be simply put in one category of private, public, or community cloud service. It allows one to extend either the capacity or the capability of a cloud service, by aggregation, integration or customization with another cloud service.

Distributed cloud

Cloud computing can also be provided by a distributed set of machines that are running at different locations, while still connected to a single network or hub service.

How Cloud Computing Works

The goal of cloud computing is to apply traditional supercomputing, or high-performance computing power, normally used by military and research facilities, to perform tens of trillions of computations per second, in consumer-oriented applications such as financial portfolios, to deliver personalized information, to provide data storage or to power large, immersive computer games.
To do this, cloud computing uses networks of large groups of servers typically running low-cost consumer PC technology with specialized connections to spread data-processing chores across them

Features

Focus on your code

Let Google worry about database administration, server configuration, sharding and load balancing. With Traffic Splitting, you can A/B test different live versions of your app. Multitenancy support lets you compartmentalize your application data.

Multiple storage options

Choose the storage option you need: a traditional MySQL database using Cloud SQL, a schemaless NoSQL datastore, or object storage using Cloud Storage.

Powerful built-in services

App Engine makes you more productive by eliminating the need to write boilerplate code. Managed services, such as Task Queues, Memcache and the Users API, let you build any application.

Deploy at Google scale

Some of the world’s most popular web services are built on our platform. You can scale up to 7 billion requests per day and automatically scale down when traffic subsides.

Uses:-

1.Agile Development on Cloud

Agility in business operations comes with effective and efficient tools that help in constructing a strong and construing business or work environment. This is due to the fact that cloud technology is built on norms like understanding service-level agreements or SLAs, developing various strategies to understand the business as a whole and then improvising as well as analyzing the steps necessary for keep the businesses running smoothly.

2.Cloud, Cost-Effective in Nature

If you haven’t opted for cloud technology till date, don’t lag behind and pop into the cloud market to enjoy a cost-effective business environment. As mentioned above that cloud promotes device independence, the cost of hardware and software automatically cuts short. Although, the initial expense of deploying cloud architecture is there, but that also focuses on pay for what you use model.

3.Disaster Recovery Plan Help to Restore Data Quickly on Cloud

For every cloud to be a successful one, pre-configured disaster recovery plan is must. Cloud disaster recovery plan works automatically at the time a server or data crashes and help in restoring at the earliest. Incorporating such applications makes cloud an efficient platform for managing IaaS, PaaS and SaaS competitively.

4.Organizations Experience Device Independence

When we say that by putting everything on cloud can reduce your worry of keeping a track of hardware and software devices, we probably want to make your existing physical world into a virtual one. With managed cloud services you don’t have to bother about what’s going on in your in-house IT premises.

Applications:-

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

Software-as-a-Service commonly refers to applications delivered to the end user through a web browser or any other web-rich client. Examples include Microsoft OfficeLive.

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS)

Platform-as-a-Service provides more customisation room, for example, for a developer to acquire a bespoke platform (such as operating system, software, and libraries) that is usually used to carry out a very specific task. Examples include Google AppEngine, SalesForce VMforce, and Joyent Accelerator.

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)

Infrastructure-as-a-Service provides maximum control where a computing infrastructure can be assembled from the operating system upwards. Examples include Amazon EC2, Eucalyptus Community Cloud, and IBM Cloudburst.

Deployment of cloud services:

Cloud services are typically made available via a private cloud, community cloud,

public cloud or hybrid cloud.

Generally speaking, services provided by a public cloud are offered over the

Internet and are owned and operated by a cloud provider. Some examples include

services aimed at the general public, such as online photo storage services, e-mail

services, or social networking sites. However, services for enterprises can also be

offered in a public cloud.

In a private cloud, the cloud infrastructure is operated solely for a specific

organization, and is managed by the organization or a third party.

In a community cloud, the service is shared by several organizations and made

available only to those groups. The infrastructure may be owned and operated by the

organizations or by a cloud service provider.

Raj knowledge

Monday, February 24, 2014

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