Chapter 9 – Cloud Platforms in

Industry
This chapter presents some of the representative cloud computing solutions
offered as:
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) services in the market.
Overview
9.1 Amazon web services
9.1.1 Compute services
9.1.2 Storage services
9.1.3 Communication services
9.1.4 Additional services

9.2 Google AppEngine

9.2.1 Architecture and core concepts
9.2.2 Application life cycle
9.2.3 Cost model
9.2.4 Observations

9.3 Microsoft Azure

9.3.1 Azure core concepts
9.3.2 SQL Azure
9.3.3 Windows Azure platform appliance
9.3.4 Observations
9.1 Amazon web services
● Development of flexible applications by providing solutions for elastic
infrastructure scalability, messaging, and data storage.
● Accessible through SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) or RESTful
(Representational State Transfer) Web service interfaces
● Expenses computed on a pay-as-you-go basis.
9.1 Amazon web services
9.1.1 Compute services
1 Amazon machine images
9.1 Amazon web services
9.1.1 Compute services
● fundamental element of cloud computing systems.
● Amazon EC2, which delivers an IaaS solution.
● Amazon EC2 allows deploying servers in the form of virtual machine
images.
● Images come with a preinstalled operating system and a software stack.

1 Amazon machine images

● Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are templates from which it is possible to
create a virtual machine.
● They are stored in Amazon S3.
● An AMI contains a physical file system layout with a predefined operating
system installed.
● Predefined operating system installed as
Amazon Ramdisk Image (ARI, id: ari-yyyyyy) and
Amazon Kernel Image (AKI, id: aki-zzzzzz)
9.1 Amazon web services
9.1.1 Compute services
2 EC2 instances
EC2 instances represent virtual machines.
The processing power is expressed in terms of virtual cores and EC2 Compute
Units (ECUs).

six major categories:

1. Standard instances.
2. Micro instances.
3. High-memory instances.
4. High-CPU instances.
5. Cluster Compute instances.
6. Cluster GPU instances.
9.1 Amazon web services
9.1.1 Compute services

3 EC2 environment
● virtual environment, which provides them with the services they require to
host applications.
● In charge of allocating addresses, attaching storage volumes, and
configuring security in terms of access control and network connectivity.
● Instances are created with an internal IP address, which makes them
capable of communicating within the EC2 network and accessing the
Internet as clients.
● Instance owners can partially control where to deploy instances. Instead,
they have a finer control over the security of the instances as well as their
network accessibility.
● EC2 instances are given domain name in the form
ec2-xxx-xxx-xxx.compute-x.amazonaws.com
9.1 Amazon web services
9.1.1 Compute services

4. Advanced compute services

● AWS CloudFormation - model that characterizes EC2 instances.

● Concepts of templates, which are JSON formatted text files.
● Templates provide a simple and declarative way to build complex systems.
● AWS Elastic Beanstalk constitutes a simple and easy way to package
applications and deploy them on the AWS Cloud.
● Service is available for Web applications developed with the Java/Tomcat
technology stack.
● Amazon Elastic MapReduce provides AWS users with a cloud computing
platform for MapReduce applications. It utilizes Hadoop as the MapReduce
engine.
9.1 Amazon web services
9.1.2 Storage services

The core service is represented by Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

The core components of S3 are two: buckets and objects.

1 S3 key concepts
2 Amazon elastic block store
3 Amazon ElastiCache
4 Structured storage solutions
5 Amazon CloudFront
 9.1 Amazon web services
9.1.2 Storage services
1 S3 key concepts
accessible through a Representational State Transfer (REST) interface.
● The storage is organized in a two-level hierarchy.
● Stored objects cannot be manipulated like standard files.
● Content is not immediately available to users.
● Requests will occasionally fail.

HTTP requests (GET, PUT, DELETE, HEAD, and POST).

Resource naming - uniform resource identifiers (URIs)

Amazon offers three different ways of addressing a bucket:
1. Canonical form: http://s3.amazonaws.com/bukect_name/
2. Subdomain form: http://bucketname.s3.amazon.com/
3. Virtual hosting form: http://bucket-name.com/
Buckets - container of objects. virtual drive hosted on the S3 distributed
storage
Objects and metadata - object is identified by a name that needs to be unique
within the bucket in which the content is stored.
Access control and security - access to buckets and objects by means of
Access Control Policies (ACPs). Different permissions can be used.
9.1 Amazon web services
9.1.2 Storage services

2 Amazon elastic block store

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provide EC2 instances with persistent
storage in the form of volumes that can be mounted at instance startup.
EBS volumes normally reside within the same availability zone of the EC2
instances that will use them to maximize the I/O performance.

3 Amazon ElastiCache
implementation of an elastic in-memory cache based on a cluster of EC2
instances.
based on a cluster of EC2 instances running the caching software, which is
made available through Web services.
ElastiCache cluster can be dynamically resized according to the demand of the
client applications.
 9.1 Amazon web services
9.1.2 Storage services

4 Structured storage solutions

Amazon provides applications with structured storage services in three different
forms:
● Preconfigured EC2 AMIs,
● Amazon Relational Data Storage (RDS), and
● Amazon SimpleDB.
Preconfigured EC2 AMIs are predefined templates featuring an installation of
a given database management system. EC2 instances created from these
AMIs can be completed with an EBS volume for storage persistence.
IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Sybase, and
Vertica.
RDS is relational database service that relies on the EC2 infrastructure and is
managed by Amazon.
Developers do not have to worry about configuring the storage for high
availability, designing failover strategies, or keeping the servers up-to-date.
Amazon SimpleDB is a lightweight, highly scalable, and flexible data storage
solution for applications that do not require a fully relational model for their data.
9.1 Amazon web services
9.1.2 Storage services

5 Amazon CloudFront
● Content delivery network.
● Collection of edge servers strategically located around the globe to better
serve requests for static and streaming Web content.
● Content that can be delivered through CloudFront is static (HTTP and
HTTPS) or streaming (Real Time Messaging Protocol, or RMTP).
9.1 Amazon web services
9.1.3 Communication services

Facilities to structure and facilitate the communication among existing

applications and services residing within the AWS infrastructure.
These facilities can be organized into two major categories:
1. Virtual networking and
2. Messaging.
9.1 Amazon web services
9.1.3 Communication services

1. Virtual networking
● Virtual networking comprises a collection of services that allow AWS users
to control the connectivity to and between compute and storage services.
● Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and Amazon Direct Connect provide
connectivity solutions in terms of infrastructure.
● Flexibility in creating virtual private networks within the Amazon
infrastructure and beyond.

2. Messaging.
● Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS),
● Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), and
● Amazon Simple Email Service (SES).
9.2 Google AppEngine
● Google AppEngine is a PaaS implementation.
● Distributed and scalable runtime environment that leverages Google’s
distributed infrastructure to scale out applications.

9.2.1 Architecture and core concepts

9.2.2 Application life cycle
9.2.3 Cost model
9.2.4 Observations
9.2 Google AppEngine
9.2 Google AppEngine
9.2.1 Architecture and core concepts
The platform is logically divided into four major components:

1 Infrastructure
2 Runtime environment
3 Storage
4 Application services
5 Compute services
9.2 Google AppEngine
9.2.1 Architecture and core concepts
1 Infrastructure
● AppEngine’s infrastructure takes advantage of many servers available
within Google datacenters. For each HTTP request, AppEngine locates the
servers hosting the application that processes the request, evaluates their
load, and, if necessary, allocates additional resources (i.e., servers) or
redirects the request to an existing server.
●
● Also responsible for monitoring application performance and collecting sta-
● tistics on which the billing is calculated.
9.2 Google AppEngine
9.2.1 Architecture and core concepts
2 Runtime environment
represents the execution context of applications hosted on AppEngine.
Sandboxing
Major responsibilities of the runtime environment is to provide the application
environment with an isolated and protected context.
Supported runtimes
● Java, Python, and Go.
● Currently supports Java 6, Java Server Pages (JSP), and applications
interact with environment by using the Java Servlet standard.
● Developers can create applications with the AppEngine Java SDK.
● Python is provided by an optimized Python 2.5.2 interpreter.
● Python Web application framework- webapp.
● Go programming language - SDK includes compiler and standard libraries
for developing applications in Go and interfacing it AppEngine services.
9.2 Google AppEngine
9.2.1 Architecture and core concepts
3 Storage
operate differently depending on the volatility of the data.

Static file servers

● Dynamic and static data.
● Dynamic data - logic of the application and the interaction with the user.
● Static data constitute of components that define the graphical layout of the
application (CSS files, plain HTML files, JavaScript files, images, icons,
and sound files) or data files.

DataStore
● DataStore is a service that allows developers to store semistructured data.
● DataStore is based on Bigtable a redundant, distributed, and
semistructured
● data store that organizes data in the form of tables.
9.2 Google AppEngine
9.2.1 Architecture and core concepts
4 Application services
Simplify common operations that are performed in Web applications:
● access to data,
● account management,
● integration of external resources,
● messaging and communication,
● image manipulation, and
● asynchronous computation.

UrlFetch
● The sandbox environment does not allow applications to open arbitrary
connections.
● HTTP/HTTPS by means of the UrlFetch service.
● Applications can make synchronous and asynchronous Web requests and
integrate the resources obtained.
● Ability to set deadlines for requests so that they can be completed (or
aborted) within a given time.
9.2 Google AppEngine
9.2.1 Architecture and core concepts
4 Application services
MemCache
● caching services by means of MemCache.
● distributed in-memory cache that is optimized for fast access and provides
volatile store for objects that are frequently accessed.
● significantly reduce the access time to data.

Mail and instant messaging

● Email can also be used to trigger activities in Web applications.
● send and receive mails through Mail service - allows sending email on
behalf of the application to specific user accounts.
● Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), Any chat service
that supports XMPP, such as Google Talk, can send and receive chat
messages to and from the Web application.

Account management
● Web applications can conveniently store profile settings in the form of
key-value pairs, attach them to a given Google account, and quickly
retrieve them once the user authenticates.
9.2 Google AppEngine
9.2.1 Architecture and core concepts
5 Compute services
● Users navigate the Web pages and get instantaneous feedback.
● Feedback is result of some computation happening on the Web
application.
● Immediate feedback and notification once the required operation is
completed.
● Task queues
● Task Queues allow applications to submit a task for a later execution.
● Cron jobs
● Schedule the required operation at the desired time.
9.2 Google AppEngine
9.2.2 Application life cycle
Testing and development, deployment, and monitoring.
Java SDK and Python SDK

1 Application development and testing

2 Application deployment and management

1 Application development and testing

● Java SDK - facility for building applications with the Java 5 and Java 6
runtime environments.
● Eclipse development environment by using the Google AppEngine plug-in -
install Java SDK, Google Web Toolkit, and Google AppEngine plug-ins into
Eclipse.
● Python SDK - Python 2.5.
● Standalone tool, called GoogleAppEngineLauncher, for managing Web
applications locally and deploying them to AppEngine.
● webapp - includes a set of models, components, and tools that simplify
development of Web applications.
9.2 Google AppEngine
9.2.2 Application life cycle
2 Application deployment and management

● Deployed on AppEngine with a simple click or command-line tool.

● Also from GoogleAppEngineLauncher and Google AppEngine plug-in.
● http://<application-id>.appspot.com.
● Also map the application with registered DNS domain name.
9.2 Google AppEngine
9.2.3 Cost model

● Set up a billing account and be charged on a pay-per-use basis.

● Developers to identify the appropriate daily budget.
● An application is measured against billable quotas, fixed quotas, and
per-minute quotas.
● Once an application reaches the quota, resource is depleted and will not
be available to application until the quota is replenished.
● Once a resource is depleted, subsequent requests to that resource will
generate an error or an exception.
9.3 Microsoft Azure
Built on top of Microsoft datacenters infrastructure and provides with collection
of services.
● Services range from compute, storage, and networking to application
connectivity, access control, and business intelligence.

● Figure 9.3 provides an overview of services provided by Azure.

9.3 Microsoft Azure
9.3.1 Azure core concepts
9.3.2 SQL Azure
9.3.3 Windows Azure platform appliance
9.3.4 Observations

9.3.1 Azure core concepts

● Made up of foundation layer and a set of developer services that can be
used to build scalable applications.
● Services cover compute, storage, networking, and identity
management, which are tied together by middleware called AppFabric.
1 Compute services
Web role
Worker role
Virtual machine role
2 Storage services
Blobs
Azure drive
Tables
Queues
9.3 Microsoft Azure
9.3.1 Azure core concepts
3 Core infrastructure: AppFabric
Access control
Service bus
Azure cache
4 Other services
Windows Azure virtual network
Windows Azure content delivery network
9.3 Microsoft Azure
9.3.1 Azure core concepts
1 Compute services
● Compute services are core components, they are delivered by means of
abstraction of roles.
● A role is a runtime environment that is customized for specific compute
task.
● Roles are managed by Azure OS and instantiated on demand.
Web role
● The Web role is designed to implement scalable Web applications.
● hosted on the IIS 7 Web Server, which is a component of the infrastructure
that supports Azure.
● .NET technology supports Web roles; developers can directly develop their
applications in Visual Studio, test them locally, and upload to Azure.
● Used to run and scale PHP Web applications on Azure.
Worker role
● Worker roles are designed to host general compute services on Azure.
● Quickly provide compute power or to host services.
● Runs continuously from the creation of its instance.
● Azure SDK provides APIs and libraries that allow connecting the role with
the service provided by runtime and easily controlling its startup.
9.3 Microsoft Azure
9.3.1 Azure core concepts
1 Compute services
Virtual machine role
● allows to fully control the computing stack of compute service by defining a
custom image of Windows Server 2008 R2 OS & their applications.
● Hyper-V virtualization technology.
● Developers can image Windows server installation into a Virtual Hard
Disk (VHD).
9.3 Microsoft
9.3.1 Azure core concepts
Azure
2 Storage services
● Windows Azure provides different types of storage solutions that
complement compute services with a more durable and redundant option
compared to local storage.
Blobs
● Store large amount of data in the form of binary large objects (BLOBs).
● Two types of blobs are available:
○ Block blobs. composed of blocks optimized for sequential access;
○ Blocks are of 4 MB, and a single block blob can reach 200 GB.
○ Page blobs. pages that are identified by an offset from the beginning
of blob.
○ Split into multiple pages or constituted of single page.
○ Optimized for random access.
○ Maximum dimension of a page blob can be 1 TB.
Azure drive
● Entire file system in the form of single Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) file.
● NTFS file system, providing persistent and durable storage.
Tables
● semistructured storage solution. Tables are more similar to spreadsheets.
● Handle large amounts of data and queries returning huge result sets.
● Currently, table can contain up to 100 TB of data, and rows can have up to
255 properties, with a maximum of 1 MB for each row.
9.3 Microsoft Azure
9.3.1 Azure core concepts
2 Storage services
Queues
● Queue storage allows applications to communicate by exchanging
messages through durable queues, thus avoiding lost or unprocessed
messages.
● Applications enter messages into a queue, and other applications can read
them in a first-in, first-out (FIFO) style.
● When an application reads a message it is marked as invisible; hence it
will not be available to other clients.
● Once Application has completed processing message, it explicitly deletes
message from queue.
● Alternative to reading a message is peeking, which allows retrieving
message but letting it stay visible in the queue.

● All the services described are geo-replicated three times to ensure their
availability in case of major disasters.
● Geo-replication involves the copying of data into a different datacenter
that is hundreds or thousands of miles away from the original
datacenter.
9.3 Microsoft Azure
9.3.1 Azure core concepts
3 Core infrastructure: AppFabric
● Middleware for developing, deploying, and managing applications on
cloud or for integrating existing applications with cloud services.
● Scaling out and high availability; sandboxing and multitenancy; state
management; and dynamic address resolution and routing.
● Simplify many common tasks in distributed application, such as
communication, authentication and authorization, and data access.
Access control
● AppFabric provides capability of encoding access control to resources in
Web applications.
● Services into set of rules that are expressed outside application code base.
● Applications can leverage Active Directory, Windows Live, Google,
Facebook, and other services to authenticate users.
Service bus
● Messaging and connectivity infrastructure.
● Designed to allow transparent network traversal and to simplify
development of loosely coupled applications letting developers focus on
logic of interaction.
● Applications need to be connected to bus, which provides these services.
9.3 Microsoft Azure
9.3.1 Azure core concepts
3 Core infrastructure: AppFabric
Azure cache
● provides a set of durable storage solutions that allow applications to persist
their data.
● Azure Cache is a service that allows developers to quickly access data
persisted on Windows Azure storage or in SQL Azure.
● implements a distributed in-memory cache of which, size can be
dynamically adjusted by applications.
9.3 Microsoft Azure
9.3.1 Azure core concepts
4 Other services
● Simplify the development and integration of applications.
Windows Azure virtual network
● includes Windows Azure Connect and Windows Azure Traffic
Manager.
● Windows Azure Connect allows easy setup of IP-based network
connectivity among machines hosted on private premises and roles
deployed on Azure Cloud.
● Windows Azure Traffic Manager provides load-balancing features for
services listening to HTTP or HTTPS ports and hosted on multiple roles.
Windows Azure content delivery network
● Content delivery network solution that improves content delivery
capabilities of Windows Azure Storage and Microsoft Windows Update,
Bing maps.
9.3 Microsoft Azure
9.3.2 SQL Azure
● SQL Azure is a relational database service hosted on Windows Azure and
built on the SQL Server technologies.
● via SQL Server - provides developers with scalable, highly available, and
fault-tolerant relational database.
● Service is manageable using REST APIs, allowing developers to control
databases.
9.3 Microsoft Azure
9.3.2 SQL Azure
9.3 Microsoft Azure
9.3.2 SQL Azure
● Developers have to sign up for Windows Azure account in order to use
SQL Azure.
● Closely resemble physical SQL Servers: They have a fully qualified domain
name under the database.windows.net
( i.e., server-name.database.windows.net) domain name.
● This simplifies management tasks and the interaction with SQL Azure from
client applications.
9.3 Microsoft Azure
9.3.3 Windows Azure platform appliance
● Can also be deployed as appliance on third-party data centers and
constitutes the cloud infrastructure governing the physical servers of
datacenter.
● Includes Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and Microsoft- specified
configuration of network, storage, and server hardware.
● The appliance targets governments and service providers who want to
have their own cloud computing infrastructure.
● Full-featured implementation of Windows Azure.
● Goal is to replicate Azure on a third-party infrastructure and make available
its services beyond boundaries of Microsoft Cloud.

The appliance addresses two major scenarios:

● institutions that have very large computing needs (such as government
agencies) and
● institutions that cannot afford to transfer their data outside their premises.
9.3 Microsoft Azure
9.3.4 Observations
● Windows Azure is Microsoft’s solution for developing cloud computing
applications.
● PaaS layer.
● Provides developer with collection of services and scal- able middleware
hosted on Microsoft datacenters that address compute, storage,
networking, and identity management needs of applications.
● Individually or all together for building both applications.
● Compute services are based on the abstraction of roles.
● AppFabric, constitutes distributed and scalable middleware of Azure.
● SQL Azure is another important element of Windows Azure and provides
support for relational data in the cloud.
● Platform is based on .NET technology and Windows systems.