14-07-2012, 03:13 PM
Cloud computing
cloud computing report.doc (Size: 988.5 KB / Downloads: 37)
ABSTRACT
Cloud computing simply means “Internet Computing”. The internet is commonly visualized as “clouds” hence the term cloud computation for computation done through the internet. With cloud computing users can access database resources via the internet from anywhere as long as they need ,without worrying about any maintenance and management of actual resources .Databases in cloud computing are scalable and dynamic. It is unlike grid computing, utility computing and autonomic computing. In fact, it is a very independent platform in terms of computing. Cloud computing provides thee facility to access the shared resources and infrastructure ,offering services on demand over the network to perform operations that meet changing business needs .The location of physical resources is typically not known to the user. Its architecture is very similar to those of other architectures as having a front end and a back end.
Public clouds are widely used in development, deployment and management of enterprise applications at affordable costs. Security is a significant part of cloud computing. Along with all the services it also hosts the data. This is almost a good and useful notion possibly aligned with the Semantic Web, though it could result in data becoming undifferentiated. As a matter of fact data is a very important part of cloud computing, thus data security is the top most priority in all data operations of cloud .Here all data are backed up at multiple locations.Thus cloud computing is the beginning of network based computing over internet in force.It is mostly free, easy to use and rich in features.
1.1 INTRODUCTION:
Cloud computing simply means “Internet Computing”. The internet is commonly visualized as “clouds” hence the term cloud computation for computation done through the internet. With cloud computing users can access database resources via the internet from anywhere as long as they need ,without worrying about any maintenance and management of actual resources .Databases in cloud computing are scalable and dynamic. It is unlike grid computing, utility computing and autonomic computing. In fact, it is a very independent platform in terms of computing. Cloud computing provides thee facility to access the shared resources and infrastructure ,offering services on demand over the network to perform operations that meet changing business needs .The location of physical resources is typically not known to the user. Its architecture is very similar to those of other architectures as having a front end and a back end.
The best example of cloud computing is Google Apps where any application can be accessed using a browser and it can be deployed on thousands of computer through the internet.
Cloud computing is a marketing term for technologies that provide computation, software, data access, and storage services that do not require end-user knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that delivers the services. A parallel to this concept can be drawn with the electricity grid, wherein end-users consume power without needing to understand the component devices or infrastructure required to provide the service.
Cloud computing describes a new supplement, consumption, and delivery model for IT services based on Internet protocols, and it typically involves provisioning of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources. It is a byproduct and consequence of the ease-of-access to remote computing sites provided by the Internet. This may take the form of web-based tools or applications that users can access and use through a web browser as if the programs were installed locally on their own computers.
Cloud computing providers deliver applications via the internet, which are accessed from web browsers and desktop and mobile apps, while the business software and data are stored on servers at a remote location. In some cases, legacy applications (line of business applications that until now have been prevalent in thin client Windows computing) are delivered via a screen-sharing technology, while the computing resources are consolidated at a remote data center location; in other cases, entire business applications have been coded using web-based technologies such as AJAX.
At the foundation of cloud computing is the broader concept of infrastructure convergence (or Converged Infrastructure) and shared services. This type of data center environment allows enterprises to get their applications up and running faster, with easier manageability and less maintenance, and enables IT to more rapidly adjust IT resources (such as servers, storage, and networking) to meet fluctuating and unpredictable business demand.[6][7]
Most cloud computing infrastructures consist of services delivered through shared data-centers and appearing as a single point of access for consumers' computing needs. Commercial offerings may be required to meet service-level agreements (SLAs), but specific terms are less often negotiated by smaller companies.
The tremendous impact of cloud computing on business has prompted the federal United States government to look to the cloud as a means to reorganize their IT infrastructure and decrease their spending budgets. With the advent of the top government official mandating cloud adoption, many agencies already have at least one or more cloud systems online.
1.2 WHAT IS IT?
Cloud Computing shares the facility to access shared resources and common infrastructure offering services on demand over the network to perform operations that meet new upcoming business demands. The term "cloud" is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on the cloud drawing used in the past to represent the telephone network, and later to depict the Internet in computer network diagrams as an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it represents.
Cloud computing is a natural evolution of the widespread adoption of virtualization, service-oriented architecture, autonomic, and utility computing. Details are abstracted from end-users, who no longer have need for expertise in, or control over, the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them.
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, were thoroughly explored in Douglas Park hill’s 1966 book, The Challenge of the Computer Utility. Other scholars have shown that cloud computing's roots go all the way back to the 1950s when scientist Herb Grosch (the author of Grosch's law) postulated that the entire world would operate on dumb terminals powered by about 15 large data centers.
The actual term "cloud" borrows from telephony in that telecommunications companies, who until the 1990s offered primarily 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 and that which was the responsibility of the user. Cloud computing extends this boundary to cover servers as well as the network infrastructure.
After the dot-com bubble, Amazon played a key role in the development of cloud computing by modernizing their data centers, 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 more easily, 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 early 2008, Eucalyptus became the first open-source, AWS API-compatible platform for deploying private clouds. In early 2008, Open Nebula, enhanced in the RESERVOIR European Commission-funded project, became the first open-source software for deploying private and hybrid clouds, and for the federation of clouds.[30] In the same year, efforts were focused on providing QoS guarantees (as required by real-time interactive applications) to cloud-based infrastructures, in the framework of the IRMOS European Commission-funded project, resulting to a real-time cloud environment. 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."
1.3 SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE:
It is a model of software deployment where an application is hosted as a service provided to customers across the internet. It generally refers to business soft wares rather than a consumer soft wares which falls under the web 2.0. By removing the need to install and run an application on users’ computer. Cloud application services or "Software as a Service (SaaS)" deliver software as a service over the Internet, eliminating the need to install and run the application on the customer's own computers and simplifying maintenance and support.
Cloud platform services, also known as platform as a service (PaaS), deliver a computing platform and/or solution stack as a service, often consuming cloud infrastructure and sustaining cloud applications. It facilitates deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software layers. Cloud computing is becoming a major change in our industry, and one of the most important parts of this change is the shift of cloud platforms. Platforms let developers write certain applications that can run in the cloud or even use services provided by the cloud. There are different names being used for platforms which can include the on-demand platform, or Cloud 9. It's your choice on what you would like to call the platform, but they all have great potential in developing. When development teams create applications for the cloud, they must build its own cloud platform.
1.4 CLOUD STORAGE:-
Cloud storage is a model of networked online storage where data is stored on virtualized pools of storage which are generally hosted by third parties. Hosting companies operate large data centre’s; and people who require their data to be hosted buy or lease storage capacity from them and use it for their storage needs. The data centre operators, in the background, virtualize the resources according to the requirements of the customer and expose them as storage pools, which the customers can themselves use to store files or data objects. Physically, the resource may span across multiple servers.
Cloud storage has the same characteristics as cloud computing in terms of agility, scalability, elasticity and multi-tenancy. It is believed to have been invented by Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider in the 1960s. Since the sixties, cloud computing has developed along a number of lines, with Web 2.0 being the most recent evolution. However, since the internet only started to offer significant bandwidth in the nineties, cloud computing for the masses has been something of a late developer.
One of the first milestones for cloud computing was the arrival of Salesforce.com in 1999, which pioneered the concept of delivering enterprise applications via a simple website. The services firm paved the way for both specialist and mainstream software firms to deliver applications over the internet. Files Anywhere also helped pioneer cloud based storage services that also enable users to securely share files online. Both of these companies continue to offer those services today.
It is difficult to pin down a canonical definition of cloud storage architecture, but object storage is reasonably analogous. Cloud storage services like Amazon S3, cloud storage products like EMC Atoms, and distributed storage research projects like OceanStore are all examples of object storage and infer the following guidelines.
Cloud storage is:
made up of many distributed resources, but still acts as one
highly fault tolerant through redundancy and distribution of data
highly durable through the creation of versioned copies
typically eventually consistent with regard to data replicas
1.4.1 Cloud Storage Advantages:-
Companies need only pay for the storage they actually use as it is also possible for companies by utilizing actual virtual storage features like thin provisioning.
Companies do not need to install physical storage devices in their own datacenter or offices, but the fact that storage has to be placed anywhere stays the same (maybe localization costs are lower in offshore locations).
Storage maintenance tasks, such as backup, data replication, and purchasing additional storage devices are offloaded to the responsibility of a service provider, allowing organizations to focus on their core business, but the fact stays the same that someone has to pay for the administrative effort for this tasks
Cloud storage provides users with immediate access to a broad range of resources and applications hosted in the infrastructure of another organization via a web service interface.
1.5 Advancing cloud computing
Cloud computing is seen by many as the next wave of information technology for individuals, companies and governments. In the spring of 2010, the World Economic Forum published a report which evaluated the impact of cloud computing technologies and highlighted the large potential benefits of adoption, ranging from economic growth and potentially sizeable improvements in employment to enabling innovation and collaboration.
While recognizing the many benefits of cloud, the report also highlighted very significant issues that could limit our ability to benefit from cloud computing.
In the second phase of the project, the World Economic Forum focused on identifying specific action areas for addressing the issues and concerns that could impact the adoption and deployment of cloud technologies. Priorities for Industry and Government, summarizes the outcomes of the second phase of the project and presents the eight actions areas for providers of cloud computing services and government agencies whose remits include encouraging, legislating and regulating the use of such new technologies.