29-08-2016, 12:39 PM
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Abstract
The term \cloud computing" is a recent buzzword in the IT world. Behind this fancy poetic phrase there lies a true picture of the future of computing for both in technical perspective and social perspective. Though the term \Cloud Computing" is recent but the idea of centralizing computation and storage in distributed data centers maintained by third party companies is not new but it came in way back in 1990s along with distributed computing approaches like grid computing. Cloud computing is aimed at providing IT as a service to the cloud users on-demand basis with greater exibility, availability, reliability and scalability with utility computing model. This new paradigm of computing has an immense potential in it to be used in the eld of e-governance and in rural development perspective in developing countries like India.
1 Introduction
Cloud computing is a recently developing paradigm of distributed computing. Though it is not a new idea that emerged just recently. In 1969 [16] L. Kleinrock anticipated, \As of now, computer networks are still in their infancy. But as they grow up and become more sophisticated, we will probably see the spread of 'computer utilities' which, like present electric and telephone utilities, will service individual homes and o ces across the country." His vision was the true indication of today's utility based computing paradigm. One of the giant steps towards this world was taken in mid 1990s when grid computing was rst coined to allow consumers to obtain computing power on demand. The origin of cloud computing can be seen as an evolution of grid computing technologies. The term Cloud computing was given prominence rst by Google's CEO Eric Schmidt in late 2006 (may be he coined the term) [6]. So the birth of cloud computing is very recent phenomena although its root belongs to some old ideas with new business, technical and social perspectives. From the archi-tectural point of view cloud is naturally build on an existing grid based architecture and uses the grid services and adds some technologies like virtualization and some business models.
In brief cloud is essentially a bunch of commodity computers networked to-gether in same or di erent geographical locations, operating together to serve a number of customers with di erent need and workload on demand basis with the help of virtualization. Cloud services are provided to the cloud users as utility ser-vices like water, electricity, telephone using pay-as-you-use business model. These utility services are generally described as XaaS (X as a Service) where X can be Software or Platform or Infrastructure etc. Cloud users use these services provided by the cloud providers and build their applications in the internet and thus deliver them to their end users. So the cloud users don't have to worry about installing, maintaining hardware and software needed. And they also can a ord these services as they have to pay as much they use. So the cloud users can reduce their expen-diture and e ort in the eld of IT using cloud services instead of establishing IT infrastructure themselves.
Cloud is essentially provided by large distributed data centers. These data centers are often organized as grid and the cloud is built on top of the grid services. Cloud users are provided with virtual images of the physical machines in the data centers. This virtualization is one of the key concept of cloud computing as it essentially builds the abstraction over the physical system. Many cloud applications are gaining popularity day by day for their availability, reliability, scalability and utility model. These applications made distributed computing easy as the critical
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aspects are handled by the cloud provider itself.
Cloud computing is growing now-a-days in the interest of technical and busi-ness organizations but this can also be bene cial for solving social issues. In the recent time E-Governance is being implemented in developing countries to improve e ciency and e ectiveness of governance. This approach can be improved much by using cloud computing instead of traditional ICT. In India, economy is agriculture based and most of the citizens live in rural areas. The standard of living, agricul-tural productivity etc can be enhanced by utilizing cloud computing in a proper way. Both of these applications of cloud computing have technological as well as social challenges to overcome.
In this report we would try to clarify some of the ideas { Why is cloud computing a buzzword today? i.e. what are the bene ts the provider and the users get using cloud? Though its idea has come long back in 1990 but what situation made it indispensable today? How is cloud built? What di erentiates it from similar terms like grid computing and utility computing? What are the di erent services are provided by the cloud providers? Though cloud computing now-a-days talks about business enterprises not the non-pro t organizations; how can this new paradigm be used in the services like e-governance and in social development issues of rural India?
2 Cloud Computing Basics
Cloud computing is a paradigm of distributed computing to provide the customers on-demand, utility based computing services. Cloud users can provide more reli-able, available and updated services to their clients in turn. Cloud itself consists of physical machines in the data centers of cloud providers. Virtualization is pro-vided on top of these physical machines. These virtual machines are provided to the cloud users. Di erent cloud provider provides cloud services of di erent abstraction level. E.g. Amazon EC2 enables the users to handle very low level details where Google App-Engine provides a development platform for the developers to develop their applications. So the cloud services are divided into many types like Software as a Service, Platform as a Service or Infrastructure as a Service. These services are available over the Internet in the whole world where the cloud acts as the single point of access for serving all customers. Cloud computing architecture addresses di culties of large scale data processing.
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2.1 Types of Cloud
Cloud can be of three types [20].
1. Private Cloud { This type of cloud is maintained within an organization and used solely for their internal purpose. So the utility model is not a big term in this scenario. Many companies are moving towards this setting and experts consider this is the 1st step for an organization to move into cloud. Security, network bandwidth are not critical issues for private cloud.
2. Public Cloud { In this type an organization rents cloud services from cloud providers on-demand basis. Services provided to the users using utility com-puting model.
3. Hybrid Cloud { This type of cloud is composed of multiple internal or exter-nal cloud. This is the scenario when an organization moves to public cloud computing domain from its internal private cloud.
2.2 Cloud Stakeholders
To know why cloud computing is used let's rst concentrate on who use it. And then we would discuss what advantages they get using cloud. There are three types of stakeholders cloud providers, cloud users and the end users [Figure 1]. Cloud providers provide cloud services to the cloud users. These cloud services are of the form of utility computing i.e. the cloud users uses these services pay-as-you-go model. The cloud users develop their product using these services and deliver the product to the end users.