Chapter 3 Cloud Infrastructure

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

Contents

IaaS services from Amazon.

Regions and availability zones for Amazon Web Services.

Instances attributes and cost.
A repertoire of Amazon Web Services.

SaaS and PaaS services from Google.

SaaS and PaaS services from Microsoft.
Open-source platforms for private clouds.
Cloud storage diversity and vendor lock-in.
Cloud interoperability; the Intercloud.
Energy use and ecological impact large datacenters .
Service and compliance level agreements.
Responsibility sharing between user and the cloud service provider.
User security concerns.
User motivation.

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

Existing cloud infrastructure

The cloud computing infrastructure at Amazon, Google, and Microsoft

(as of mid 2012).

Amazon is a pioneer in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

Google's efforts are focused on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
Microsoft is involved in PaaS.

Private clouds are an alternative to public clouds. Open-source cloud

computing platforms such as:

Eucalyptus,
OpenNebula,
Nimbus,
OpenStack

can be used as a control infrastructure for a private cloud.

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS IaaS cloud computing services launched in 2006.

Businesses in 200 countries used AWS in 2012.

The infrastructure consists of compute and storage servers

interconnected by high-speed networks and supports a set of
services.

An application developer:

Installs applications on a platform of his/her choice.

Manages resources allocated by Amazon.

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

AWS regions and availability zones

Amazon offers cloud services through a network of data centers on

several continents.
In each region there are several availability zones interconnected by
high-speed networks.
An availability zone is a data center consisting of a large number of
servers.

Regions do not share resources and communicate through the

Internet.

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

AWS instances

An instance is a virtual server with a well specified set of

resources including: CPU cycles, main memory, secondary
storage, communication and I/O bandwidth.
The user chooses:

The region and the availability zone where this virtual server
should be placed.
An instance type from a limited menu of instance types.

When launched, an instance is provided with a DNS name; this

name maps to a

private IP address for internal communication within the

internal EC2 communication network.
public IP address for communication outside the internal
Amazon network, e.g., for communication with the user that
launched the instance.

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

AWS instances (contd)

Network Address Translation (NAT) maps external IP addresses to

internal ones.

The public IP address is assigned for the lifetime of an instance.

An instance can request an elastic IP address, rather than a public IP

address. The elastic IP address is a static public IP address allocated
to an instance from the available pool of the availability zone.

An elastic IP address is not released when the instance is stopped or

terminated and must be released when no longer needed.

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

EC2
instance
Compute server

EC2 instance

Instance
EC2
instance

Compute server

SQS

Compute server

Cloud watch
Cloud front
Elastic cache

Cloud interconnect

NAT

Internet
Cloud formation
Elastic beanstalk
Elastic load balancer
AWS management
console

S3

EBS

S3
Servers running AWS
services

S3

EBS

SDB
SDB
SDB

S3
Simple DB
AWS storage servers

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

Steps to run an application

Retrieve the user input from the front-end.

Retrieve the disk image of a VM (Virtual Machine) from a

repository.

Locate a system and requests the VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor)

running on that system to setup a VM.

Invoke the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and the

IP bridging software to set up MAC and IP addresses for the VM.

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

10

User interactions with AWS

The AWS Management Console. The easiest way to access all

services, but not all options may be available.

AWS SDK libraries and toolkits are provided for several

programming languages including Java, PHP, C#, and Objective-C.

Raw REST requests.

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

11

Examples of Amazon Web Services

AWS Management Console - allows users to access the services

offered by AWS .
Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) - allows a user to launch a variety
of operating systems.
Simple Queuing Service (SQS) - allows multiple EC2 instances to
communicate with one another.
Simple Storage Service (S3), Simple DB, and Elastic Bloc Storage
(EBS) - storage services.
Cloud Watch - supports performance monitoring.
Auto Scaling - supports elastic resource management.
Virtual Private Cloud - allows direct migration of parallel
applications.

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

12

CloudWatch
EC2
Linux, Debian,
Fedora,OpenSolaris,
Open Suse, Red Hat,
Ubuntu, Windows, Suse
Linux

S3

EBS

SQS -Simple Queue Service

EC2
Simple DB

Linux, Debian,
Fedora,OpenSolaris,
Open Suse, Red Hat,
Ubuntu, Windows, Suse
Linux

Virtual Private Cloud

Autoscaling

AWS Management Console

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

13

EC2 Elastic Cloud Computing

EC2 - web service for launching instances of an application under

several operating systems, such as:

Several Linux distributions.

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and 2008.
OpenSolaris.
FreeBSD.
NetBSD.

A user can

Load an EC2 instance with a custom application environment.

Manage networks access permissions.
Run the image using as many or as few systems as desired.

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

14

EC2 (contd)

Import virtual machine (VM) images from the user environment to an

instance through VM import.
EC2 instances boot from an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) digitally
signed and stored in S3.
Users can access:

Images provided by Amazon.

Customize an image and store it in S3.

An EC2 instance is characterized by the resources it provides:

VC (Virtual Computers) virtual systems running the instance.

CU (Compute Units) measure computing power of each system.
Memory.
I/O capabilities.

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Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

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Instance types

Standard instances: micro (StdM), small (StdS), large (StdL), extra

large (StdXL); small is the default.
High memory instances: high-memory extra large (HmXL), highmemory double extra large (Hm2XL), and high-memory quadruple
extra large (Hm4XL).
High CPU instances: high-CPU extra large (HcpuXL).
Cluster computing: cluster computing quadruple extra large (Cl4XL).

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Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

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Instance cost

A main attraction of the Amazon cloud computing is the low cost.

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Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

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S3 Simple Storage System

Service designed to store large objects; an application can handle

an unlimited number of objects ranging in size from 1 byte to 5 TB.
An object is stored in a bucket and retrieved via a unique,
developer-assigned key; a bucket can be stored in a Region
selected by the user.
Supports a minimal set of functions: write, read, and delete; it does
not support primitives to copy, to rename, or to move an object from
one bucket to another.
The object names are global.
S3 maintains for each object: the name, modification time, an
access control list, and up to 4 KB of user-defined metadata.

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

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S3 (contd)

Authentication mechanisms ensure that data is kept secure.

Objects can be made public, and rights can be granted to other
users.
S3 computes the MD5 of every object written and returns it in a
field called ETag.
A user is expected to compute the MD5 of an object stored or
written and compare this with the ETag; if the two values do
not match, then the object was corrupted during transmission
or storage.

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

19

Elastic Block Store (EBS)

Provides persistent block level storage volumes for use with EC2
instances; suitable for database applications, file systems, and
applications using raw data devices.
A volume appears to an application as a raw, unformatted and reliable
physical disk; the range 1 GB -1 TB.
An EC2 instance may mount multiple volumes, but a volume cannot
be shared among multiple instances.
EBS supports the creation of snapshots of the volumes attached to an
instance and then uses them to restart the instance.
The volumes are grouped together in Availability Zones and are
automatically replicated in each zone.

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Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

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SimpleDB

Non-relational data store. Supports store and query functions

traditionally provided only by relational databases.

Supports high performance Web applications; users can store and

query data items via Web services requests.

Creates multiple geographically distributed copies of each data item.

It manages automatically:

Dan C. Marinescu

The infrastructure provisioning.

Hardware and software maintenance.
Replication and indexing of data items.
Performance tuning.
Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.
Chapter 3

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SQS - Simple Queue Service

Hosted message queues are accessed through standard SOAP

and Query interfaces.

Supports automated workflows - EC2 instances can coordinate by

sending and receiving SQS messages.

Applications using SQS can run independently and

asynchronously, and do not need to be developed with the same
technologies.

A received message is locked'' during processing; if processing

fails, the lock expires and the message is available again.

Queue sharing can be restricted by IP address and time-of-day.

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

22

CloudWatch

Monitoring infrastructure used by application developers, users,

and system administrators to collect and track metrics
important for optimizing the performance of applications and for
increasing the efficiency of resource utilization.
Without installing any software a user can monitor either seven
or eight pre-selected metrics and then view graphs and
statistics for these metrics.
When launching an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) the user can
start the CloudWatch and specify the type of monitoring:

Basic Monitoring - free of charge; collects data at five-minute

intervals for up to seven metrics.
Detailed Monitoring - subject to charge; collects data at one
minute interval.

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

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AWS services introduced in 2012

Route 53 - low-latency DNS service used to manage user's DNS

public records.
Elastic MapReduce (EMR) - supports processing of large amounts of
data using a hosted Hadoop running on EC2.
Simple Workflow Service (SWF) - supports workflow management;
allows scheduling, management of dependencies, and coordination of
multiple EC2 instances.
ElastiCache - enables web applications to retrieve data from a
managed in-memory caching system rather than a much slower diskbased database.
DynamoDB - scalable and low-latency fully managed NoSQL
database service.

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Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

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AWS services introduced in 2012 (contd)

CloudFront - web service for content delivery.

Elastic Load Balancer - automatically distributes the incoming
requests across multiple instances of the application.
Elastic Beanstalk - handles automatically deployment, capacity
provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application
monitoring functions.
CloudFormation - allows the creation of a stack describing the
infrastructure for an application.

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

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Elastic Beanstalk

Handles automatically the deployment, capacity provisioning, load

balancing, auto-scaling, and monitoring functions.
Interacts with other services including EC2, S3, SNS, Elastic Load
Balance and AutoScaling.
The management functions provided by the service are:

Deploy a new application version (or rollback to a previous version).

Access to the results reported by CloudWatch monitoring service.
Email notifications when application status changes or application
servers are added or removed.
Access to server log files without needing to login to the application
servers.

The service is available using: a Java platform, the PHP server-side

description language, or the .NET framework.

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

26

SaaS services offered by Google

Gmail - hosts Emails on Google servers and provides a web

interface to access the Email.
Google docs - a web-based software for building text documents,
spreadsheets and presentations.
Google Calendar - a browser-based scheduler; supports multiple
user calendars, calendar sharing, event search, display of
daily/weekly/monthly views, and so on.
Google Groups - allows users to host discussion forums to create
messages online or via Email.
Picasa - a tool to upload, share, and edit images.
Google Maps - web mapping service; offers street maps, a route
planner, and an urban business locator for numerous countries
around the world

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

27

PaaS services offered by Google

AppEngine - a developer platform hosted on the cloud.

Initially supported Python, Java was added later.

The database for code development can be accessed with GQL
(Google Query Language) with a SQL-like syntax.

Google Co-op - allows users to create customized search engines

based on a set of facets/categories.
Google Drive - an online service for data storage.
Google Base - allows users to load structured data from different
sources to a central repository, a very large, self-describing, semistructured, heterogeneous database.

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Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

28

PaaS and SaaS services from Microsoft

Windows Azure - an operating system; has 3 components:

Compute - provides a computation environment.

Storage - for scalable storage.
Fabric Controller - deploys, manages, and monitors applications.

SQL Azure - a cloud-based version of the SQL Server.

Azure AppFabric, formerly .NET Services - a collection of services
for cloud applications.

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Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

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Azure
Connect

Applications and Data

CDN

Storage

Compute

Blobs

Tables

Queues

Fabric Controller

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Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

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Open-source platforms for private clouds

Eucalyptus - can be regarded as an open-source counterpart of

Amazon's EC2.

Open-Nebula - a private cloud with users actually logging into the

head node to access cloud functions. The system is centralized
and its default configuration uses the NFS file system.

Nimbus - a cloud solution for scientific applications based on

Globus software; inherits from Globus:

Dan C. Marinescu

The image storage.

The credentials for user authentication.
The requirement that a running Nimbus process can ssh into all
compute nodes.

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Eucalyptus

Virtual Machines - run under several VMMs including Xen, KVM,

and VMware.
Node Controller - runs on server nodes hosting a VM and controls
the activities of the node.
Cluster Controller - controls a number of servers.
Cloud Controller - provides the cloud access to end-users,
developers, and administrators.
Storage Controller - provides persistent virtual hard drives to
applications. It is the correspondent of EBS.
Storage Service (Walrus) - provides persistent storage; similar to
S3, it allows users to store objects in buckets.

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Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

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Dan C. Marinescu

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Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

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Cloud storage diversity and vendor lock-in

Risks when a large organization relies on a single cloud service

provider:

Cloud services may be unavailable for a short or an extended

period of time.
Permanent data loss in case of a catastrophic system failure.
The provider may increase the prices for service.

Switching to another provider could be very costly due to the large

volume of data to be transferred from the old to the new provider.

A solution is to replicate the data to multiple cloud service

providers, similar to data replication in RAID.

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Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

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RAID 5 controller

a1

a2

a3

aP

b1

b2

bP

b3

c1

cP

c2

c3

dP

d1

d2

d3

Disk 1

Disk 2

Disk 3

Disk 4

(a)
Cloud 1

Cloud 2
a1
b1
c1
dP

Client

a2
b2
d1
c1
cP
d1

Proxy
a3
bP
c2
d2
aP
d3
b3
c3
d3

Cloud 3

Cloud 4

(b)

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Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

36

Cloud interoperability; the Intercloud

An Intercloud a federation of clouds that cooperate to provide a

better user experience.
Is an Intercloud feasible?
Not likely at this time:

Dan C. Marinescu

There are no standards for either storage or processing.

The clouds are based on different delivery models.
The set of services supported by these delivery models is large
and open; new services are offered every few months.
CSPs (Cloud Service Providers) believe that they have a
competitive advantage due to the uniqueness of the added value
of their services.
Security is a major concern for cloud users and an Intercloud could
only create new threats.

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Energy use and ecological impact

The energy consumption of large-scale data centers and their costs

for energy and for cooling are significant.
In 2006, the 6,000 data centers in the U.S consumed 61x109 KWh of
energy, 1.5% of all electricity consumption, at a cost of $4.5 billion.
The energy consumed by the data centers was expected to double
from 2006 to 2011 and peak instantaneous demand to increase from
7 GW to 12 GW.
The greenhouse gas emission due to the data centers is estimated to
increase from 116 x109 tones of CO2 in 2007 to 257 tones in 2020
due to increased consumer demand.
The effort to reduce energy use is focused on computing, networking,
and storage activities of a data center.

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

38

Energy use and ecological impact (contd)

Operating efficiency of a system is captured by the performance per

Watt of power.
The performance of supercomputers has increased 3.5 times faster
than their operating efficiency 7,000% versus 2,000% during the
period 1998 2007.
A typical Google cluster spends most of its time within the 10-50%
CPU utilization range; there is a mismatch between server workload
profile and server energy efficiency.

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

39

Energy-proportional systems

An energy-proportional system consumes no power when idle, very

little power under a light load and, gradually, more power as the load
increases.
By definition, an ideal energy-proportional system is always
operating at 100% efficiency.
Humans are a good approximation of an ideal energy proportional
system; about 70 W at rest, 120 W on average on a daily basis, and
can go as high as 1,000 2,000 W during a strenuous, short time
effort.
Even when power requirements scale linearly with the load, the
energy efficiency of a computing system is not a linear function of
the load; even when idle, a system may use 50% of the power
corresponding to the full load.

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

40

Percentage of
power usage
100

Typical operating
region

90

Power

80
70

Energy
efficiency

60
50
40
30
20
10
0
0

Dan C. Marinescu

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

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90

100

Percentage
of system
utilization
41

Service Level Agreement (SLA)

SLA - a negotiated contract between the customer and CSP; can be

legally binding or informal. Objectives:

Identify and define the customers needs and constraints including

the level of resources, security, timing, and QoS.
Provide a framework for understanding; a critical aspect of this
framework is a clear definition of classes of service and the costs.
Simplify complex issues; clarify the boundaries between the
responsibilities of clients and CSP in case of failures.
Reduce areas of conflict.
Encourage dialog in the event of disputes.
Eliminate unrealistic expectations.

Specifies the services that the customer receives, rather than how
the cloud service provider delivers the services.

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Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

42

Responsibility sharing between user and CSP

User responsibility

SaaS

Dan C. Marinescu

PaaS

IaaS

Interface

Interface

Interface

Application

Application

Application

Operating system

Operating system

Operating system

Hypervisor

Hypervisor

Hypervisor

Computing service

Computing service

Computing service

Storage service

Storage service

Storage service

Network

Network

Network

Local infrastructure

Local infrastructure

Local infrastructure

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

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L
O
U
D
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R
S
E
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V
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User security concerns

Potential loss of control/ownership of data.

Data integration, privacy enforcement, data encryption.
Data remanence after de-provisioning.
Multi tenant data isolation.
Data location requirements within national borders.
Hypervisor security.
Audit data integrity protection.
Verification of subscriber policies through provider controls.
Certification/Accreditation requirements for a given cloud service.

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Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

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Reasons driving decision to use public clouds

Dan C. Marinescu

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice.

Chapter 3

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