[Unit 1: Introduction]

Cloud Computing (CSC-458)

Jagdish Bhatta

Central Department of Computer Science & Information Technology

Tribhuvan University

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Cloud Computing Chapter- Introduction

Introduction:

What is Cloud?

The term cloud has been used historically as a metaphor for the
Internet and has become a familiar cliché. This usage was
originally derived from its common depiction in network diagrams
as an outline of a cloud, used to represent the transport of data
across carrier backbones (which owned the cloud) to an endpoint
location on the other side of the cloud.

The cloud itself is a set of hardware, networks, storage, services,

and interfaces that enable the delivery of computing as a service.
Cloud services include the delivery of software, infrastructure, and storage
over the internet (either as separate components or a complete platform)
based on user demand.

The world of the cloud has lots of participants:

✓ The end user doesn’t really have to know anything about the underlying technology. In
small businesses, for example, the cloud provider becomes the de facto data center. In
larger organizations, the IT organization oversees the inner workings of both internal
resources and external cloud resources.

✓ Business management needs to take responsibility for overall governance of data or

services living in a cloud. Cloud service providers must provide a predictable and
guaranteed service level and security to all their constituents.

✓ The cloud service provider is responsible for IT assets and maintenance.

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Overall, the cloud embodies the following four basic characteristics:

✓ Elasticity and the ability to scale up and down

✓ Self-service provisioning and automatic deprovisioning
✓ Application programming interfaces (APIs)
✓ Billing and metering of service usage in a pay-as-you-go model

Elasticity and scalability:

The service provider can’t anticipate how customers will use the service. One customer
might use the service three times a year during peak selling seasons, whereas another
might use it as a primary development platform for all of its applications. Therefore, the
service needs to be available all the time (7 days a week, 24 hours a day) and it has to be
designed to scale upward for high periods of demand and downward for lighter ones.
Scalability also means that an application can scale when additional users are added
and when the application requirements change. This ability to scale is achieved by
providing elasticity. Think about the rubber band and its properties. If you’re holding
together a dozen pens with a rubber band, you probably have to fold it in half. However, if
you’re trying to keep 100 pens together, you will have to stretch that rubber band. Why can
a single rubber band accomplish both tasks? Simply, it is elastic and so is the cloud. :
Elasticity refers to the ability to flex to meet the needs and preferences of users on a
near real-time basis, in response to supply and demand triggers. In the cloud context,
elasticity refers to the ability of a service or an infrastructure to adjust to meet fluctuating
service demands by automatically provisioning or de-provisioning resources or by moving
the service to be executed on another part of the system.

Self-service provisioning:
Customers can easily get cloud services without going through a lengthy process. The
customer simply requests an amount of computing, storage, software, process, or other
resources from the service provider. Contrast this on-demand response with the process at a

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typical data center. When a department is about to implement a new application, it has to
submit a request to the data center for additional computing hardware, software, services,
or process resources. The data center gets similar requests from departments across the
company and must sort through all requests and evaluate the availability of existing
resources versus the need to purchase new hardware. After new hardware is purchased, the
data center staff has to configure the data center for the new application. These internal
procurement processes can take a long time, depending on company policies. Of course,
nothing is as simple as it might appear. While the on-demand provisioning capabilities
of cloud services eliminate many time delays, an organization still needs to do its
homework. These services aren’t free; needs and requirements must be determined before
capability is automatically provisioned.

Application programming interfaces (APIs):

Cloud services need to have standardized APIs. These interfaces provide the
instructions on how two application or data sources can communicate with each
other. A standardized interface lets the customer more easily link a cloud service, such as a
customer relationship management system with a financial accounts management system,
without having to resort to custom programming.

Billing and metering of services:

A cloud environment needs a built-in service that bills customers. And, of course, to
calculate that bill, usage has to be metered (tracked). Even free cloud services (such as
Google’s Gmail or Zoho’s Internet-based office applications) are metered.

Cloud Computing:

Cloud computing is the use of computing resources (hardware and software) that are
delivered as a service over a network (typically the Internet). The name comes from
the use of a cloud-shaped symbol as an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it
contains in system diagrams. Cloud computing entrusts remote services with a user's
data, software and computation.

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Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted
services over the Internet. These services are broadly divided into three categories:
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-
Service (SaaS). The name cloud computing was inspired by the cloud symbol that's often
used to represent the Internet in flowcharts and diagrams.

A cloud service has three distinct characteristics that differentiate it from traditional
hosting.

- It is sold on demand, typically by the minute or the hour;

- It is elastic -- a user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any
given time; and

- The service is fully managed by the provider (the consumer needs nothing but a
personal computer and Internet access). Significant innovations in virtualization
and distributed computing, as well as improved access to high-speed Internet and a
weak economy, have accelerated interest in cloud computing.

A more tempered view of cloud computing considers it the delivery of computational

resources from a location other than the one from which you are computing.

The service consumer no longer has to be at a PC, use an application from the PC, or
purchase a specific version that's configured for smartphones, PDAs, and other devices.
The consumer does not own the infrastructure, software, or platform in the cloud. He/She
has lower upfront costs, capital expenses, and operating expenses. He/She does not care
about how servers and networks are maintained in the cloud. The consumer can access
multiple servers anywhere on the globe without knowing which ones and where they are
located.

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Emergence of Cloud Computing:

The origin of the term cloud computing is obscure, but it appears to derive from the
practice of using drawings of stylized clouds to denote networks in diagrams of
computing and communications systems. The word cloud is used as a metaphor for the
Internet, based on the standardized use of a cloud-like shape to denote a network on
telephony schematics and later to depict the Internet in computer network diagrams as an
abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it represents. The cloud symbol was used to
represent the Internet as early as 1994.

In the 1990s, telecommunications companies, who previously 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 users. Cloud computing extends this boundary to cover
servers as well as the network infrastructure.

The underlying concept of cloud computing dates back to the 1950s; when large-
scale mainframe became available in academia and corporations, accessible via thin
clients /terminal computers. Because it was costly to buy a mainframe, it became
important to find ways to get the greatest return on the investment in them, allowing
multiple users to share both the physical access to the computer from multiple terminals as
well as to share the CPU time, eliminating periods of inactivity, which became known in
the industry as time-sharing.

As in the earliest stages, the term “cloud” was used to represent the computing space
between the provider and the end user. In 1997, Professor Ramnath Chellapa of Emory
University and the University of South California defined cloud computing as the new
“computing paradigm where the boundaries of computing will be determined by

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economic rationale rather than technical limits alone.” This has become the basis of
what we refer to today when we discuss the concept of cloud computing.

Some people think cloud computing is the next big thing in the world of IT. Others believe
it is just another variation of the utility computing model that has been repackaged in this
decade as something new and cool.

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.

The next development was Amazon Web Services in 2002, which provided a suite of
cloud-based services including storage, computation and even human intelligence through
the Amazon Mechanical Turk. Then in 2006, Amazon launched its Elastic Compute cloud
(EC2) as a commercial web service that allows small companies and individuals to rent
computers on which to run their own computer applications.

Cloud Based Service Models:

The services given by the service provider to the customers or users through cloud
computing technology are said cloud services. Service Provider’s server gives both the
hardware and software necessary and thus easy in management for both user and the cloud
service provider. Cloud computing providers offer their services according to three
fundamental models: Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS),
and software as a service (SaaS) where IaaS is the most basic and each higher model
abstracts from the details of the lower models.

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IaaS: In this most basic cloud service model, providers offer computers, as physical
or more often as virtual machines, and other resources. The virtual machines are run as
guests by a hypervisor, such as Xen or KVM. Management of pools of hypervisors by the
cloud operational support system leads to the ability to scale to support a large number of
virtual machines. Other resources in IaaS clouds include images in a virtual machine
image library, raw (block) and file-based storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP
addresses, virtual local area networks (VLANs), and software bundles. Amies, Alex;
Sluiman, Harm; Tong IaaS cloud providers supply these resources on demand from their
large pools installed in data centers. For wide area connectivity, the Internet can be used or
—in carrier clouds -- dedicated virtual private networks can be configured

To deploy their applications, cloud users then install operating system images on the
machines as well as their application software. In this model, it is the cloud user who is
responsible for patching and maintaining the operating systems and application software.
Cloud providers typically bill IaaS services on a utility computing basis, that is, cost
will reflect the amount of resources allocated and consumed. STaaS - STorage As A
Service. This service comes under IaaS, which manages all the storage services in cloud

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computing. There are many security issues in this service. They are Data Integrity,
Confidentiality, Reliability, etc.

IaaS refers not to a machine that does all the work, but simply to a facility given to
businesses that offers users the leverage of extra storage space in servers and data
centers.

Examples of IaaS include: Amazon CloudFormation (and underlying services such

as Amazon EC2), Rackspace Cloud, Terremark, Windows Azure Virtual Machines, Google
Compute Engine, and Joyent.

PaaS: In the PaaS model, cloud providers deliver a computing platform typically
including operating system, programming language execution environment, database,
and web server. Application developers can develop and run their software solutions on a
cloud platform without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying
hardware and software layers. With some PaaS offers, the underlying computer and
storage resources scale automatically to match application demand such that cloud
user does not have to allocate resources manually.

Examples of PaaS include: Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, Cloud Foundry, Heroku,

Force.com, EngineYard, Mendix, Google App Engine, Windows Azure
Compute and OrangeScape.

SaaS: In this model, cloud providers install and operate application software in the
cloud and cloud users access the software from cloud clients. The cloud users do not
manage the cloud infrastructure and platform on which the application is running.
This eliminates the need to install and run the application on the cloud user's own
computers simplifying maintenance and support. What makes a cloud application
different from other applications is its scalability. This can be achieved by cloning tasks
onto multiple virtual machines at run-time to meet the changing work demand. Load
balancers distribute the work over the set of virtual machines. This process is transparent to
the cloud user who sees only a single access point. To accommodate a large number of

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cloud users, cloud applications can be multitenant, that is, any machine serves more
than one cloud user organization. It is common to refer to special types of cloud based
application software with a similar naming convention: desktop as a service, business
process as a service, test environment as a service, communication as a service.

The pricing model for SaaS applications is typically a monthly or yearly flat fee per
user, so price is scalable and adjustable if users are added or removed at any point.

Examples of SaaS include: Google Apps, Microsoft Office 365, and Onlive.

Grid Computing or Cloud Computing?

Grid computing is often confused with cloud computing. Grid computing is a form of
distributed computing that implements a virtual supercomputer made up of a cluster of
networked or Internetworked computers acting in unison to perform very large tasks. Many
cloud computing deployments today are powered by grid computing implementations and
are billed like utilities, but cloud computing can and should be seen as an evolved next step
away from the grid utility model. There is an ever-growing list of providers that have
successfully used cloud architectures with little or no centralized infrastructure or billing
systems, such as the peer-to-peer network BitTorrent and the volunteer computing
initiative SETI@home.

Service commerce platforms are yet another variation of SaaS and MSPs. This type of
cloud computing service provides a centralized service hub that users interact with.
Currently, the most often used application of this platform is found in financial trading
environments or systems that allow users to order things such as travel or personal services
from a common platform (e.g., Expedia.com or Hotels.com), which then coordinates
pricing and service delivery within the specifications set by the user.

Cloud computing evolves from grid computing and provides on-demand resource
provisioning. Grid computing may or may not be in the cloud depending on what type of
users are using it. If the users are systems administrators and integrators, they care how

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things are maintained in the cloud. They upgrade, install, and virtualize servers and
applications. If the users are consumers, they do not care how things are run in the system.

The difference between grid computing and cloud computing is hard to grasp because
they are not always mutually exclusive. In fact, they are both used to economize computing
by maximizing existing resources. However, the difference between the two lies in the
way the tasks are computed in each respective environment. In a computational grid,
one large job is divided into many small portions and executed on multiple machines. This
characteristic is fundamental to a grid; not so in a cloud. The computing in cloud is
intended to allow the user to avail of various services without investing in the underlying
architecture. Cloud services include the delivery of software, infrastructure, and storage
over the Internet (either as separate components or a complete platform) based on user
demand.

Cloud computing and grid computing are scalable. Scalability is accomplished through
load balancing of application instances running separately on a variety of operating
systems and connected through Web services. CPU and network bandwidth is allocated
and de-allocated on demand. The system's storage capacity goes up and down depending
on the number of users, instances, and the amount of data transferred at a given time.

Both computing types involve multitenancy and multitask, meaning that many customers
can perform different tasks, accessing a single or multiple application instances. Sharing
resources among a large pool of users assists in reducing infrastructure costs and peak load
capacity. Cloud and grid computing provide service-level agreements (SLAs) for
guaranteed uptime availability of, say, 99 percent. If the service slides below the level of
the guaranteed uptime service, the consumer will get service credit for receiving data late.
The Amazon S3 provides a Web services interface for the storage and retrieval of data in
the cloud. Setting a maximum limits the number of objects you can store in S3. You can
store an object as small as 1 byte and as large as 5 GB or even several terabytes. S3 uses
the concept of buckets as containers for each storage location of your objects. The data is

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stored securely using the same data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses for its e-
commerce Web sites.

While the storage computing in the grid is well suited for data-intensive storage, it is not
economically suited for storing objects as small as 1 byte. In a data grid, the amounts of
distributed data must be large for maximum benefit. A computational grid focuses on
computationally intensive operations. Amazon Web Services in cloud computing offers
two types of instances: standard and high-CPU.

(Refer the research article, provided in the class, entitled “Cloud Computing and Grid
Computing 360-Degree Compared”, by the authors; Ian Foster, Yong Zhao, Ioan
Raicu, Shiyong Lu, published in 2008).

Virtualization:

Virtualization is the key to cloud computing, since it is the enabling technology allowing
the creation of an intelligent abstraction layer which hides the complexity of underlying
hardware or software.

Server virtualization enables different operating systems to share the same hardware
and make it easy to move operating systems between different hardware, all while the
applications are running.

Storage virtualization does the same thing for data. Storage virtualization creates the
abstraction layer between the applications running on the servers, and the storage
they use to store the data.

Virtualizing the storage and incorporating the intelligence for provisioning and protection
at the virtualization layer enables companies to use any storage they want, and not be
locked into any individual vendor. Storage virtualization makes storage a commodity. All
this makes for some interesting ways for companies to reduce their costs.

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Any discussion of cloud computing typically begins with virtualization. Virtualization is

critical to cloud computing because it simplifies the delivery of services by providing
a platform for optimizing complex IT resources in a scalable manner, which is what
makes cloud computing so cost effective.

Virtualization can be applied very broadly to just about everything you can imagine
including memory, networks, storage, hardware, operating systems, and applications.
Virtualization has three characteristics that make it ideal for cloud computing:

- Partitioning: In virtualization, you can use partitioning to support many

applications and operating systems in a single physical system.

- Isolation: Because each virtual machine is isolated, each machine is protected from
crashes and viruses in the other machines. What makes virtualization so important
for the cloud is that it decouples the software from the hardware.

- Encapsulation: Encapsulation can protect each application so that it doesn’t

interfere with other applications. Using encapsulation, a virtual machine can be
represented (and even stored) as a single file, making it easy to identify and present
to other applications.

To understand how virtualization helps with cloud computing, you must understand its
many forms. In essence, in all cases, a resource actually emulates or imitates another
resource. Here are some examples:

- Virtual memory: Disks have a lot more space than memory. PCs can use virtual
memory to borrow extra memory from the hard disk. Although virtual disks are
slower than real memory, if managed right, the substitution works surprisingly well.

- Software: There is virtualization software available that can emulate an entire

computer, which means 1 computer can perform as though it were actually 20
computers. Using this kind of software you might be able to move from a data
center with thousands of servers to one that supports as few as a couple of hundred.

To manage the various aspects of virtualization in cloud computing most companies

use hypervisors, an operating system that act as traffic cop managing the various
virtualization tasks in the cloud to ensure that they make the things happen in an orderly

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manner. Because in cloud computing you need to support many different operating
environments, the hypervisor becomes an ideal delivery mechanism by allowing you to
show the same application on lots of different systems. Because hypervisors can load
multiple operating systems, they are a very practical way of getting things virtualized
quickly and efficiently.

Cloud Computing Deployment Models (Types):

Public: The infrastructure is made available to the general public or a large industry
group and is owned by an organization selling cloud services. It is also referred to as
‘external’ Cloud that describes the conventional meaning of Cloud computing:
scalable, dynamically provisioned, often virtualized resources available over the
internet from an off-site third party provider, which divides up resources and bills its
customers on a ‘utility’ basis.

Public cloud applications, storage, and other resources are made available to the general
public by a service provider. These services are free or offered on a pay-per-use model.
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).

Private: The infrastructure is operated solely for an organization; it may be managed

by the organization or a third party and may exist on or off the premises of the
organization. It is also referred to as ‘corporate’ or ‘internal’ Cloud, term used to
denote a proprietary computing architecture providing hosted services on private
networks.

A private cloud could provide the computing resources needed for a large organization,
e.g., a research institution, a university, or a corporation. There are some arguments that a
private cloud does not support utility computing when the user pays as it consumes
resources.

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Undertaking a private cloud project requires a significant level and degree of engagement
to virtualize the business environment, and it will require the organization to reevaluate
decisions about existing resources. When it is done right, it can have a positive impact on a
business, but every one of the steps in the project raises security issues that must be
addressed in order to avoid serious vulnerabilities

Community: 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: Here, the infrastructure is a composition of two or more clouds (private, or

public) that remain unique entities but are bound together by standardized or
proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud
bursting for load-balancing between clouds). Cloud bursting is an application
deployment model in which an application runs in a private cloud or data center
and bursts into a public cloud when the demand for computing capacity spikes. The
advantage of such a hybrid cloud deployment is that an organization only pays for
extra compute resources when they are needed. Experts recommend cloud bursting for
high performance, non-critical applications that handle non-sensitive information. An
application can be deployed locally and then burst to the cloud to meet peak demands, or
the application can be moved to the public cloud to free up local resources for business-
critical applications. Cloud bursting works best for applications that don’t depend on a
complex application delivery infrastructure or integration with other applications,
components and systems internal to the data center.

By utilizing "hybrid cloud" architecture, companies and individuals are able to

obtain degrees of fault tolerance combined with locally immediate usability without
dependency on internet connectivity. Hybrid cloud architecture requires both on-
premises resources and off-site (remote) server-based cloud infrastructure.

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Hybrid clouds lack the flexibility, security and certainty of in-house applications. Hybrid
cloud provides the flexibility of in house applications with the fault tolerance and
scalability of cloud based services.

Fig: Types of Cloud Deployment Models

Ethical issues in cloud computing:

Cloud computing is based on a paradigm shift with profound implications on computing

ethics. The main elements of this shift are:
(i) the control is relinquished to third party services;
(ii) the data is stored on multiple sites administered by several organizations; and
(iii) multiple services interoperate across the network.

Unauthorized access, data corruption, infrastructure failure, or unavailability are some of

the risks related to relinquishing the control to third party services; moreover, it is difficult
to identify the source of the problem and the entity causing it. Systems can span the
boundaries of multiple organizations and cross the security borders, a process called
deperimeterisation. As a result of de-perimeterisation “not only the border of the
organizations IT infrastructure blurs, also the border of the accountability becomes less
clear”.

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The complex structure of cloud services can make it difficult to determine who is
responsible in case something undesirable happens. In a complex chain of events or
systems, many entities contribute to an action with undesirable consequences, some of
them have the opportunity to prevent these consequences, and therefore no one can
be held responsible, the so-called “problem of many hands.”

Ubiquitous and unlimited data sharing and storage among organizations test the
selfdetermination of information, the right or ability of individuals to exercise personal
control over the collection, use and disclosure of their personal data by others; this tests the
confidence and trust in todays evolving information society. Identity fraud and theft are
made possible by the unauthorized access to personal data in circulation and by new forms
of dissemination through social networks and they could also pose a danger to cloud
computing.

The question of what can be done proactively about ethics of cloud computing does
not have easy answers as many undesirable phenomena in cloud computing will only
appear in time. But the need for rules and regulations for the governance of cloud
computing are obvious. The term governance means the manner in which something is
governed or regulated, the method of management, the system of regulations. Explicit
attention to ethics must be paid by governmental organizations providing research funding;
private companies are less constraint by ethics oversight and governance arrangements are
more conducive to profit generation.

Accountability is a necessary ingredient of cloud computing; adequate information

about how data is handled within the cloud and about allocation of responsibility are
key elements to enforcing ethics rules in cloud computing. Recorded evidence allows us
to assign responsibility; but there can be tension between privacy and accountability and it
is important to establish what is being recorded, and who has access to the records.

Unwanted dependency on a cloud service provider, the so-called vendor lock-in, is a

serious concern and the current standardization efforts at NIST attempt to address

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this problem. Another concern for the users is a future with only a handful of companies
which dominate the market and dictate prices and policies

Benefits of using cloud models:

Because customers generally do not own the infrastructure used in cloud computing
environments, they can forgo capital expenditure and consume resources as a service
by just paying for what they use. Many cloud computing offerings have adopted the
utility computing and billing model described above, while others bill on a subscription
basis. By sharing computing power among multiple users, utilization rates are
generally greatly improved, because cloud computing servers are not sitting dormant
for lack of use. This factor alone can reduce infrastructure costs significantly and
accelerate the speed of applications development.

A beneficial side effect of using this model is that computer capacity increases
dramatically, since customers do not have to engineer their applications for peak times,
when processing loads are greatest. Adoption of the cloud computing model has also been
enabled because of the greater availability of increased high-speed bandwidth. With greater
enablement, though, there are other issues one must consider, especially legal ones.

The following are some of the possible benefits for those who offer cloud computing-based
services and applications:

- Cost Savings — Companies can reduce their capital expenditures and use
operational expenditures for increasing their computing capabilities. This is a lower
barrier to entry and also requires fewer in-house IT resources to provide system
support.

- Scalability/Flexibility — Companies can start with a small deployment and grow

to a large deployment fairly rapidly, and then scale back if necessary. Also, the
flexibility of cloud computing allows companies to use extra resources at peak
times, enabling them to satisfy consumer demands.

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- Reliability — Services using multiple redundant sites can support business

continuity and disaster recovery.

- Maintenance — Cloud service providers do the system maintenance, and access is

through APIs that do not require application installations onto PCs, thus further
reducing maintenance requirements.

- Mobile Accessible — Mobile workers have increased productivity due to systems

accessible in an infrastructure available from anywhere.

Characteristics of Cloud Computing:

Cloud computing has a variety of characteristics, with the main ones being:

- Shared Infrastructure — Uses a virtualized software model, enabling the sharing

of physical services, storage, and networking capabilities. The cloud infrastructure,
regardless of deployment model, seeks to make the most of the available
infrastructure across a number of users.

- Dynamic Provisioning / on demand self service — Allows for the provision of

services based on current demand requirements. This is done automatically using
software automation, enabling the expansion and contraction of service capability,
as needed. This dynamic scaling needs to be done while maintaining high levels of
reliability and security.

- Broad Network Access — Needs to be accessed across the internet from a broad
range of devices such as PCs, laptops, and mobile devices, using standards-based
APIs (for example, ones based on HTTP). Deployments of services in the cloud
include everything from using business applications to the latest application on the
newest smartphones.

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- Multi-Tenant Capable - The resources (e.g., network, storage and compute power)
can be shared among multiple enterprise clients, thereby lowering overall expense.
Resource virtualization is used to enforce isolation and aid in security.

- Rapid Elasticity - The consumer should have the ability to rapidly (often
automatically) increase or decrease the computing resources needed to carry out
their work.

- Managed Metering / Measured Service - Uses metering for managing and

optimizing the service and to provide reporting and billing information. In this way,
consumers are billed for services according to how much they have actually used
during the billing period. In short, cloud computing allows for the sharing and
scalable deployment of services, as needed, from almost any location, and for
which the customer can be billed based on actual usage.

Evolution of cloud computing:

Cloud computing can be seen as an innovation in different ways. From a technological

perspective it is an advancement of computing, applying virtualization concepts to utilize
hardware more efficiently. Yet a different point of view is to look at cloud computing from
an IT deployment perspective. In this sense cloud computing has the potential to
revolutionize the way, how computing resources and applications are provided, breaking
up traditional value chains and making room for new business models. In the following
section we are going to describe the emergence of cloud computing from both
perspectives.

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Fig: Evolution of Computing Paradigms from mainframe to cloud computing

Challenges for cloud computing

The development of efficient cloud applications inherits the challenges posed by the
natural imbalance between computing, I/O, and communication bandwidths of physical
systems; these challenges are greatly amplified due the scale of the system, its distributed
nature, and by the fact that virtually all applications are data-intensive. Though cloud
computing infrastructures attempt to automatically distribute and balance the load, the
application developer is still left with the responsibility to place the data close to the
processing site and to identify optimal storage for the data. One of the main advantages of
cloud computing, the shared infrastructure, could also have a negative impact as perfect
performance isolation is nearly impossible to reach in a real system, especially when the

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system is heavily loaded. The performance of virtual machines fluctuates based on the
load, the infrastructure services, the environment including the other users. Reliability is
also a major concern; node failures are to be expected whenever a large numbers of nodes
cooperate for the computations. Choosing an optimal instance, in terms of performance
isolation, reliability, and security, from those offered by the cloud infrastructure is another
critical factor to be considered. Of course, cost considerations play also a role in the choice
of the instance type. Many applications consist of multiple stages; in turn, each stage may
involve multiple instances running in parallel on the systems of the cloud and
communicating among them. Thus, efficiency, consistency, and communication scalability
of communication are major concerns for an application developer. Indeed, due to shared
networks and unknown topology, cloud infrastructures exhibit inter-node latency and
bandwidth fluctuations which affect the application performance.

The following are some of the notable challenges associated with cloud computing, and
although some of these may cause a slowdown when delivering more services in the cloud,
most also can provide opportunities, if resolved with due care and attention in the planning
stages.

- Security and Privacy — Perhaps two of the more “hot button” issues surrounding
cloud computing relate to storing and securing data, and monitoring the use of the
cloud by the service providers. These issues are generally attributed to slowing the
deployment of cloud services. These challenges can be addressed, for example, by
storing the information internal to the organization, but allowing it to be used in the
cloud. For this to occur, though, the security mechanisms between organization and
the cloud need to be robust and a Hybrid cloud could support such a deployment.

- Lack of Standards — Clouds have documented interfaces; however, no standards

are associated with these, and thus it is unlikely that most clouds will be
interoperable. The Open Grid Forum is developing an Open Cloud Computing
Interface to resolve this issue and the Open Cloud Consortium is working on cloud
computing standards and practices. The findings of these groups will need to

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mature, but it is not known whether they will address the needs of the people
deploying the services and the specific interfaces these services need. However,
keeping up to date on the latest standards as they evolve will allow them to be
leveraged, if applicable.

- Continuously Evolving — User requirements are continuously evolving, as are the

requirements for interfaces, networking, and storage. This means that a “cloud,”
especially a public one, does not remain static and is also continuously evolving.

- Compliance Concerns — The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in the US and Data

Protection directives in the EU are just two among many compliance issues
affecting cloud computing, based on the type of data and application for which the
cloud is being used. The EU has a legislative backing for data protection across all
member states, but in the US data protection is different and can vary from state to
state. As with security and privacy mentioned previously, these typically result in
Hybrid cloud deployment with one cloud storing the data internal to the
organization.

Distributed Computing in Grid and Cloud :

Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems.

A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate
through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to
achieve a common goal.

Distributed computing also refers to the use of distributed systems to solve computational
problems. In distributed computing, a problem is divided into many tasks, each of which is
solved by one or more computers, which communicate with each other by message
passing.

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The word distributed in terms such as "distributed system", "distributed programming",

and "distributed algorithm" originally referred to computer networks where individual
computers were physically distributed within some geographical area. The terms are
nowadays used in a much wider sense, even referring to autonomous processes that run on
the same physical computer and interact with each other by message passing. While there
is no single definition of a distributed system, the following defining properties are
commonly used:

- There are several autonomous computational entities, each of which has its own
local memory.
- The entities communicate with each other by message passing

Parallel Vs. Distributed Computing

Distributed systems are groups of networked computers, which have the same goal
for their work. The terms "concurrent computing", "parallel computing", and
"distributed computing" have a lot of overlap, and no clear distinction exists between
them. The same system may be characterized both as "parallel" and "distributed"; the
processors in a typical distributed system run concurrently in parallel. Parallel computing
may be seen as a particular tightly coupled form of distributed computing, and distributed
computing may be seen as a loosely coupled form of parallel computing. Nevertheless, it is
possible to roughly classify concurrent systems as "parallel" or "distributed" using the
following criteria:

- In parallel computing, all processors may have access to a shared memory to

exchange information between processors.
- In distributed computing, each processor has its own private memory (distributed
memory). Information is exchanged by passing messages between the processors.

The figure below illustrates the difference between distributed and parallel systems. Figure
(a) is a schematic view of a typical distributed system; as usual, the system is represented

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as a network topology in which each node is a computer and each line connecting the
nodes is a communication link. Figure (b) shows the same distributed system in more
detail: each computer has its own local memory, and information can be exchanged only
by passing messages from one node to another by using the available communication links.
Figure (c) shows a parallel system in which each processor has a direct access to a shared
memory.

The last decade, the term 'Grid' has been a key topic in the field of high
performance/distributed computing. The Grid has emerged as a new field of
distributed computing, focusing on secure sharing of computational and storage
resources among dynamic sets of people and organizations who own these resources.
This sharing of resources can give people not only computational capabilities and data
storage capabilities that cannot be provided by a single supercomputing center, but it also
allows them to share data in a transparent way.

Grid Computing can be defined as applying resources from many computers in a network
to a single problem, usually one that requires a large number of processing cycles or access
to large amounts of data.

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At its core, Grid Computing enables devices-regardless of their operating

characteristics-to be virtually shared, managed and accessed across an enterprise,
industry or workgroup. This virtualization of resources places all of the necessary access,
data and processing power at the fingertips of those who need to rapidly solve complex
business problems, conduct compute-intensive research and data analysis, and operate in
real-time.

Distributed computing was one of the first real instances of cloud computing. Long
before Google or Amazon, there was SETI@Home. Proposed in 1995 and launched in
1999, this program uses the spare capacity of internet connected machines to search
for extraterrestrial intelligence. This is sort of the cloud in reverse.

A more recent example would be software like Hadoop. Written in Java, Hadoop is a
scalable, efficient, distributed software platform designed to process enormous amounts of
data. Hadoop can scale to thousands of computers across many clusters.

Distributed computing is nothing more than utilizing many networked computers to

partition (split it into many smaller pieces) a question or problem and allow the network to
solve the issue piecemeal.

Another instance of distributed computing, for storage instead of processing power, is

bittorrent. A torrent is a file that is split into many pieces and stored on many computers
around the internet. When a local machine wants to access that file, the small pieces are
retrieved and rebuilt.

As the cloud computing buzzword has evolved, distributed computing has fallen out
of that particular category of software. Even though distributed computing might
take advantage of the internet, it doesn’t follow the other tenants of cloud computing,
mainly the automatic and instant scalability of resources.

That’s not to say that a distributed system couldn’t be built to be a cloud environment.
Bittorrent, or any P2P system, comes very close to a cloud storage. It would require some
additional protections like file ownership and privacy across all nodes but it could probably
be done. Privacy like that is not quite what P2P is all about though.

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The Cloud Computing paradigm originates mainly from research on distributed

computing and virtualization, as it is based on principles, techniques and technologies
developed in these areas.

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