Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing makes computer infrastructure and services available "on-need" basis. The
computing infrastructure could include hard disk, development platform, database, computing
power or complete software applications. To access these resources from the cloud vendors,
organizations do not need to make any large scale capital expenditures. Organization need to
"pay per use" i.e. organization need to pay only as much for the computing infrastructure as they
use. The billing model of cloud computing is similar to the electricity payment that we do on the
basis of usage. In the description below vendor is used for cloud computing service provide and
organization is used for user of cloud computing services.

Cloud Computing has the following characteristics:

A. Availability of large computing infrastructure on need basis: Cloud vendors provide

appearance of infinite computing infrastructure availability. This is available to
organizations on need basis. This ensures that organizations do not need to set up servers
for their peak requirements. As an example consider the official Wimbledon site. The site
gets extremely high traffic in the two weeks when the championship happens. For this
two weeks period this site will have high server usage. For rest of the year the site will
need to only pay for the reduced usage. In general organizations do not need to bear the
cost of computing infrastructure for their peak loads. The usage of computing resources
can be increased or reduced on need basis, is called elastic computing.
B. Cloud computing uses a "pay-per-use" billing model. Cloud billing model are very
different when compared to traditional IT billing techniques. Typical billing models
include per user billing, per GB billing or per-use billing (i.e. an organization is billed on
each usage of the computing service).
C. Cloud computing typically does not involve long-term commitment to use the computing
infrastructure. The vendor does not enforce long-term usage of services.
D. Cloud computing does not involve any significant capital expenditure for the
organization. Unlike traditional IT infrastructure, in cloud computing organizations just
use the computing services without procuring it. In some sense cloud computing involves
renting the computing resources instead of buying them. As the figure below displays,
unlike traditional computing model, Cloud computing requires no capital expenditure to
acquire initial computing resources. The figure below is from cloud computing wiki.
 E. Since the cloud computing vendor provides services over the web, these are available
from any location.
F. Cloud computing can be ordered online without detailed formal contracts.

Cloud computing provides a level-playing field for smaller organizations. It allows smaller
organization access to computing infrastructure without making any significant initial
investment.

Many experts believe that cloud computing will lead to increased commoditization of computing
resources.

Origin of term

Cloud traditionally depicts the internet. Since cloud computing is built using internet, hence the
name.

Examples of Cloud Computing applications

Hotmail.com was launched in 1996, It is widely considered as the first cloud computing
application. The data is stored at the vendor servers, and users could pay incrementally to
increase disk space usage. Many other services have emerged in the last decade that allows users
to store information (or perform processing) without paying any upfront charges. These are
typically consumer oriented services. Twitter, myspace, Wikipedia, youtube, facebook, linkedin,
Google docs and blogger all have the characteristics explained above and are examples of cloud
computing. Companies that provide Hosting services for diskspace storage, images, emails are
all examples of cloud computing
Salesforce.com, founded in 1999, was the first successful example of providing software as a
service in the business to business domain. Salesforce is a CRM tool for sales executives
providing features like managing customer details, running promotions etc.

Google and Microsoft provide development platforms that can be accessed with "pay-per-use"
billing model. All these services are examples of Cloud computing.

Amazon.com was one of the first vendors to provide storage space and computing resources
following the cloud computing model.

Virtualization and Cloud Computing:

The main enabling technology for Cloud Computing is Virtualization. Virtualization is a partitioning of
single physical server into multiple logical servers. Once the physical server is divided, each logical
server behaves like a physical server and can run an operating system and applications independently.
Many popular companies’s like VmWare and Microsoft provide virtualization services, where instead of
using your personal PC for storage and computation, you use their virtual server. They are fast, cost-
effective and less time consuming.

For software developers and testers virtualization comes very handy, as it allows developer to write
code that runs in many different environments and more importantly to test that code.

Virtualization is mainly used for three main purposes 1) Network Virtualization 2) Server Virtualization
3) Storage Virtualization

Network Virtualization: It is a method of combining the available resources in a network by splitting up

the available bandwidth into channels, each of which is independent from the others and each channel
is independent of others and can be assigned to a specific server or device in real time.

Storage Virtualization: It is the pooling of physical storage from multiple network storage devices into
what appears to be a single storage device that is managed from a central console. Storage virtualization
is commonly used in storage area networks (SANs).

Server Virtualization: Server virtualization is the masking of server resources like processors, RAM,
operating system etc, from server users. The intention of server virtualization is to increase the resource
sharing and reduce the burden and complexity of computation from users.

Virtualization is the key to unlock the Cloud system, what makes virtualization so important for the
cloud is that it decouples the software from the hardware. For example, PC’s can use virtual memory to
borrow extra memory from the hard disk. Usually hard disk has a lot more space than memory.
Although virtual disks are slower than real memory, if managed properly the substitution works
perfectly. Likewise, there is software which can imitate an entire computer, which means 1 computer
can perform the functions equals to 20 computers.
Security concerns for Cloud Computing:
While using cloud computing, the major issue that concerns the users is about its security.

One concern is that cloud providers themselves may have access to customer’s unencrypted data-
whether it’s on disk, in memory or transmitted over the network.

Some countries government may decide to search through data without necessarily notifying the data
owner, depending on where the data resides, which is not appreciated and is considered as a privacy
breach (Example Prism Program by USA).

To provide security for systems, networks and data cloud computing service providers have joined hands
with TCG ( Trusted Computing Group) which is non-profit organization which regularly releases a set of
specifications to secure hardware, create self-encrypting drives and improve network security. It
protects the data from root kits and malware.

As computing has expanded to different devices like hard disk drives and mobile phones, TCG has
extended the security measures to include these devices. It provides ability to create a unified data
protection policy across all clouds.

Some of the trusted cloud services are Amazon, Box.net, Gmail and many others.

Privacy Concern & Cloud Computing:

Privacy present a strong barrier for users to adapt into Cloud Computing systems

There are certain measures which can improve privacy in cloud computing.

The administrative staff of the cloud computing service could theoretically monitor the data moving in
memory before it is stored in disk.To keep the confidentiality of a data, administrative and legal controls
should prevent this from happening.

The other way for increasing the privacy is to keep the data encrypted at the cloud storage site,
preventing unauthorized access through the internet; even cloud vendor can’t access the data either.