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The Calculus of Cloud Computing

Preprint · February 2019

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.13483.49446/1

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Zhaohao Sun
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BAIS 4(11): 1-6.

The Calculus of Cloud Computing

Zhaohao Sun
Research Centre of Big Analytics and Intelligent Systems (BAIS)
Department of Business Studies
PNG University of Technology, Lae, PNG
Email: [email protected]; [email protected]

Abstract. Cloud computing has attracted increasing attention in academia and

industries. However, its fundamentals are still controversial, for example, what
is cloud computing? What is the mathematical foundation of cloud computing?
How can we use mathematical methods and thinking to treat cloud computing?
This paper will address these three issues. For the first issue, this paper proposes
a unified framework for cloud computing as a science, technology, engineering,
system, service and industry. For the second and third issues, we propose the
calculus of cloud computing, which treats many aspects of cloud computing
using mathematical methods and thinking. The proposed approaches in this paper
will facilitate the research and development of cloud computing, intelligent
analytics, and business intelligence as well as artificial intelligence.

Keywords: cloud computing, big data analytics, intelligent analytics, and

business intelligence as well as artificial intelligence.

1 Introduction

Cloud computing has attracted increasing attention in academia and industry in the
past decade (Varghese & Buyya, 2019). The core of cloud computing can be
summarized by the following 3 service models, 4 deployment models and 5
characteristics (Wu & Buyya, 2015) (Wu, Buyya, & Ramamohana, 2016)
• 3 service models: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS
• 4 deployment models: Public, Private, Community and Hybrid Cloud
• 5 characteristics: On-demand, Bread network access, Resource pool, rapid
elasticity, and measured service.
The service models can be considered as service orientation (Wu, Buyya, &
Ramamohana, 2016); deployment models as customized delivery, and 5 characteristics
as shared infrastructure of the cloud.
However, the following three issues have not been drawn significant attention in the
scholarly peer-reviewed literature:
• What is cloud computing?
• What is the mathematical foundation of cloud computing?
• How can we apply mathematical methods and thinking to cloud computing?
This paper will address these three issues. For the first issue, this paper proposes a
unified framework for cloud computing as a science, technology, engineering, system,
2

service and industry. For the second and third issues, we propose the calculus of cloud
computing, which treats many aspects of cloud computing using mathematical methods
and thinking. The proposed approaches in this paper will facilitate the research and
development of cloud computing, intelligent analytics, and business intelligence as well
as artificial intelligence.
The remainder of this paper is organised as follows. Section 2 reviews the existing
definitions of cloud computing and provides a unified definition of cloud computing
towards a discipline of science and technology. Section 3 presents a unified framework
for cloud computing as a science, technology, engineering, system, service and
industry. Section 4 proposes the calculus of cloud computing, which treats many
aspects of cloud computing using mathematical methods and thought. The final
sections discuss the related work and end this paper with some concluding remarks and
future work.

2 Defining Cloud Computing

There are many definitions of cloud computing. For example,

There are many definitions on CC (Buyya, Broberg, & Goscinski, 2010).
1. Cloud computing is shared pools of configurable computer system resources
and higher-level services that can be rapidly provisioned with minimal
management effort, often over the Internet (Wikipedia, 2019).
2. the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) defines cloud
computing as a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand
network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g.,
networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly
provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service
provider interaction (NIST, 2018).
The first definition given by Wikipedia considers cloud computing as computer
system resources and higher-level services so that cloud computing is not related to
science, engineering and technology, nor management. The second given by the
National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) considers cloud computing as
a model for accessing computing resources. A model is a part of science, engineering
and technology, nor management. But a model is not science, engineering and
technology, nor management. Therefore, the above definitions have related to science,
engineering and technology, nor management. Can we state that the definition of cloud
computing is too much market-oriented, industry-oriented, far from the academic
flavor. This is the reason why we consider cloud computing for our universities and
students as well as scholars in the next section.

3 A Unified Framework for Cloud Computing

This section presents a unified framework for cloud computing as a science,

technology, engineering, system, service and industry.
 3

3.1 Cloud Computing as a Science and Technology

Cloud Computing is a science

Cloud Computing is a technology

3.2 Cloud Computing as a System

Cloud Computing is a system

3.3 Cloud Computing as a Management

Management is the process of manager’s coordinating and overseeing the work
activities of others so that their activities are completed [30]. The main management
functions or activities of a manager consist of planning, organizing, leading and
controlling [30, p. 133] [29, pp. 14-19]. Cloud computing as a management can be
briefly represented as:
Cloud computing as a management = Management of cloud computing + Cloud
computing for management (1)
The following subsections will look at management of cloud computing and cloud
computing for management to some detail.

3.4 Cloud Computing as a Service

4

System Science

Cloud
Management computing Engineering

Service Technology

Figure 1. A unified framework for cloud computing

4 Calculus of Cloud Computing

This section proposes the calculus of cloud computing, which treats many aspects of
cloud computing using mathematical methods and thinking.

4.1 How to understand resources in cloud computing?

When defining cloud computing, (Wikipedia, 2019) uses computer system resources,
whereas NIST uses computing resources. (Erl, Mahmood, & Puttini, 2013) uses IT
resources as resources of cloud computing. (Varghese & Buyya, 2019) uses resources
for cloud computing. This means that the resources of cloud computing should be either
computer system resources or computing resources or IT resources. Are computer
system resources, computing resources and IT resources same? No, mathematically,

IT  ICT  computing.
That is,
IT resources  ICT resources  computing resources.

Computer system resources can be either IT resources or ICT resources. Therefore,

it is a part of computing resources. The above mathematical analysis implies that the
IT resources is very limited in semantics, whereas ICT is more general and computing
resources are most general and can be used as resources of cloud computing (Varghese
& Buyya, 2019).
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The above analysis leads to a new question. What are the resources of cloud
computing. At least we have known that the resources contain Computer system
resources, IT resources, ICT resources, computing resources, storage resources
(Varghese & Buyya, 2019), etc. It is necessary to develop a research on this topic.

Question 1: Can we consider all these resources in the cloud computing as big data.
If yes, then we have
IT resources  ICT resources  computing resources  big data.
In such a way, big data is the strategic resources of cloud computing. Big data is the
basic and raw materials for resources and services processing in cloud computing.

4.2 How to understand types of cloud?

Hybrid Cloud is a multi-cloud with a combination of public and private clouds or a

combination of public and private IT infrastructure (Varghese & Buyya, 2019).
Hybrid cloud = public cloud + private cloud
Hybrid cloud = public cloud ∨ private cloud ∨ community cloud

4.3 How to understand cloud services

IaaS, PaaS and SaaS

These three services are at three levels. Therefore, the relationships among them can
be represented as
IaaS ⊕PaaS < IaaS ⊕ SaaS. Am I right?- 20 02 19

4.4 Cloud Analytics = Big data Analytics + Cloud Computing

Wu, Buyya and Ramamohana (2016) represent Big data Analytics mathematically as
Big data Analytics = Machine learning + Cloud Computing (1)
Machine learning is a part of artificial intelligence (Sun & Huo, 2019), that is
machine learning artificial intelligence. Then we can have
Big data Analytics = artificial intelligence + Cloud Computing (2)
Based on (Sun & Wang, 2017),
Big Data analytics = Big data + Big data analysis + Big DW + Big DM + Big SM +
Big ML + Big Visualization
Where DW is data warehousing, DM is data mining, SM is statistical modeling, ML
is machine learning
Then we have
Cloud Analytics = Big data + Big data analysis + Big DW + Big DM + Big SM +
Big ML + Big Visualization + Cloud Computing (3)
This implies that the above result is more inclusive than either (1) or (2).
6

5 Discussion and Implications

We have mentioned several scholarly researches on cloud computing. In what follows,

we will focus on related work, discussion and implications on the Calculus of Cloud
Computing.
Calculus is a branch of mathematics that “deals with rates of change”, based on the
Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary. The term calculus is also used for naming
specific methods of calculation or notation as well as some theories, such as
propositional calculus and process calculus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus,
accessed 20 Feb 19). This paper uses the latter annotation of calculus for this research.
We have searched for "The Calculus of Cloud Computing" using Google Scholar
during our developing this research for a few times. There are no similar publications
to this topic now.

6 Conclusion

This paper proposes a unified framework for cloud computing as a science, technology,
engineering, system, service and industry. It also presents the calculus of cloud
computing, which treats many aspects of cloud computing using mathematical methods
(including logic and set theory) and thinking. The proposed approaches in this paper
will facilitate the research and development of cloud computing, intelligent analytics,
and business intelligence as well as artificial intelligence
In the future work, besides mentioned in the previous section, we will analyse the
proposed framework of cloud computing with the cases of the real world. We will also
explore the calculus of cloud computing and its applications in big data analytics, web
services and artificial intelligence.

If you have interest in this research and like to cooperate with me change it to a
publication, please do not hesitate to contact me.

7 References

Buyya, R., Broberg, J., & Goscinski, A. M. (2010). Cloud Computing Principles and
Paradigms. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Erl, T., Mahmood, Z., & Puttini, R. (2013). Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology &
Architecture. Pearson.
Holsapplea, C., Lee-Postb, A., & Pakath, R. (2014). A unified foundation for business
analytics. Decision Support Systems, 64, 130–141. doi:DOI:
10.1016/j.dss.2014.05.013
Laudon, K., & Laudon, J. (2012). Management Information Systems-Managing the Dgital
Firm. Boston: Person.
 7

Lim, E., Chen, H., & Chen, G. (2013). Business Intelligence and Analytics: Research
Directions. ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, 3(4, Article
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Minelli, M., Chambers, M., & Dhiraj, A. (2013). Big Data, Big Analytics: Emerging Business
Intelligence and Analytic Trends for Today's Businesses. Wiley & Sons (Chinese
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NIST. (2018, 1 08). Final Version of NIST Cloud Computing Definition Published. Retrieved 2
20, 2019, from https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2011/10/final-version-nist-
cloud-computing-definition-published
Robbins, S., Bergman, R., Stagg, I., & Coulter, M. (2012). Management 6. Frenchs Forest:
Pearson Australia.
Sun, Z., & Huo, Y. (2019). The spectrum of big data analytics. Journal of Computer
Information Systems, Online published on 12 Feb 2019.
doi:10.1080/08874417.2019.1571456
Sun, Z., & Wang, P. P. (2017). A Mathematical Foundation of Big Data. Journal of New
Mathematics and Natural Computation, 13(2), 8-24.
Terry, G. R. (1968). Principles of Management (5th Edition). Homewood, Illinois: Richard D.
Irwin, Inc.
Varghese, B., & Buyya, R. (2019). Next generation cloud computing: New trends and research
directions. Future Generation Computer Systems 79 , 849–861.
Venters, W., & Whitley, E. A. (2012). A crticial review of cloud computing: Researching
desires and realities. Journal of Information Technology, 27, 179-197.
Wikipedia. (2019, 2 10). Cloud Computing. Retrieved 2 20, 2019, from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
Wu, C., & Buyya, R. (2015). Cloud Data Centers and Cost Modeling . Morgan Kaffmann.
Wu, C., Buyya, R., & Ramamohana, K. (2016). Big Data Analytics = Machine Learning +
Cloud Computing. Retrieved July 20, 2018, from
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1601/1601.03115.pdf

Updated on 18 02 19; 20 02 19, 22 02 19

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