Cloud Computing

Characteristics:
 Evolution of Cloud Computing

• Cloud computing is all about renting

computing services. This idea first came in the
1950s. In making cloud computing what it is
today, five technologies played a vital role.
These are distributed systems and its
peripherals, virtualization, web 2.0, service
orientation, and utility computing.
Evolution
 Distributed Systems:
• It is a composition of multiple independent systems but all of them
are depicted as a single entity to the users.
• The purpose of distributed systems is to share resources and also use
them effectively and efficiently.
• Distributed systems possess characteristics such as scalability,
concurrency, continuous availability, heterogeneity, and independence
in failures.
• But the main problem with this system was that all the systems were
required to be present at the same geographical location. Thus to
solve this problem, distributed computing led to three more types of
computing and they were-Mainframe computing, cluster computing,
and grid computing.
 Mainframe computing:
• Mainframes which first came into existence in 1951 are
highly powerful and reliable computing machines.
• These are responsible for handling large data such as
massive input-output operations.
• Even today these are used for bulk processing tasks such as
online transactions etc.
• These systems have almost no downtime with high fault
tolerance. After distributed computing, these increased the
processing capabilities of the system.
• But these were very expensive. To reduce this cost, cluster
computing came as an alternative to mainframe technology.
 Cluster computing:
• In 1980s, cluster computing came as an alternative to
mainframe computing.
• Each machine in the cluster was connected to each other by
a network with high bandwidth.
• These were way cheaper than those mainframe systems.
• These were equally capable of high computations. Also,
new nodes could easily be added to the cluster if it was
required. Thus, the problem of the cost was solved to some
extent but
• the problem related to geographical restrictions still
pertained. To solve this, the concept of grid computing was
introduced.
 Grid computing:
• In 1990s, the concept of grid computing was introduced. It means
that different systems were placed at entirely different geographical
locations and these all were connected via the internet.
• These systems belonged to different organizations and thus the grid
consisted of heterogeneous nodes.
• Although it solved some problems but new problems emerged as
the distance between the nodes increased.
• The main problem which was encountered was the low availability
of high bandwidth connectivity and with it other network associated
issues.
• Thus. cloud computing is often referred to as “Successor of grid
computing”
 Virtualization:
• It was introduced nearly 40 years back. It refers to the
process of creating a virtual layer over the hardware
which allows the user to run multiple instances
simultaneously on the hardware.
• It is a key technology used in cloud computing.
• It is the base on which major cloud computing
services such as Amazon EC2, VMware vCloud, etc
work on.
• Hardware virtualization is still one of the most
common types of virtualization.
 Service orientation:
• It acts as a reference model for cloud
computing. It supports low-cost, flexible, and
evolvable applications.
• Two important concepts were introduced in
this computing model.
• These were Quality of Service (QoS) which
also includes the SLA (Service Level
Agreement) and Software as a Service (SaaS).
 Utility computing:
• It is a computing model that defines service
provisioning techniques for services such as
compute services along with other major
services such as storage, infrastructure, etc
which are provisioned on a pay-per-use basis.

 These technologies contributed to the making

of cloud computing.
SYSTEM MODELS FOR DISTRIBUTED
AND CLOUD COMPUTING
Distributed and cloud computing
systems are built over a large number
of autonomous computer nodes.
 Classification of distributed and cloud
computing system
• Massive systems are considered highly scalable, and can
reach web-scale connectivity, either physically or logically.
• Massive systems are classified into four groups: clusters,
P2P networks, computing grids, and Internet clouds over
huge data centers.
• In terms of node number, these four system classes may
involve hundreds, thousands, or even millions of
computers as participating nodes.
• These machines work collectively, cooperatively, or
collaboratively at various levels.
 Cloud
A cloud is a pool of virtualized computer resources. A cloud can host a variety
of different workloads, including batch-style backend jobs and interactive
and user-facing applications.

A cloud allows workloads to be deployed and scaled out quickly through rapid
provisioning of virtual or physical machines. The cloud supports
redundant, self-recovering, highly scalable programming models that
allow workloads to recover from many unavoidable hardware/software
failures.
 The idea is to move desktop computing to a service-oriented platform using
server clusters and huge databases at data centers. Cloud computing
leverages its low cost and simplicity to benefit both users and providers.
Machine virtualization has enabled such cost-effectiveness. 
Cloud:
 Cloud service models
Cloud computing as an on-demand computing paradigm
resolves or relieves us from the problems like:
• constant system maintenance
• poor utilization
• increasing costs associated with
– hardware/software upgrades

Cloud service models:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) 
•   Platform as a Service (PaaS) 
• Software as a Service (SaaS) 
 Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) 

• This model puts together infrastructures

demanded by users—namely servers, storage,
networks, and the data center fabric.
• The user can deploy and run on multiple VMs
running guest OSes on specific applications.
• The user does not manage or control the
underlying cloud infrastructure, but can specify
when to request and release the needed
resources.
 Platform as a Service (PaaS) 
• This model enables the user to deploy user-built
applications onto a virtualized cloud platform.
• PaaS includes middleware, databases, development
tools, and some runtime support such as Web 2.0 and
Java.
• The platform includes both hardware and software
integrated with specific programming interfaces.
• The provider supplies the API and software tools (e.g.,
Java, Python, Web 2.0, .NET). The user is freed from
managing the cloud infrastructure.
 Software as a Service (SaaS) 

• This refers to browser-initiated application software

over thousands of paid cloud customers.
• The SaaS model applies to business processes, industry
applications, consumer relationship management
(CRM), enterprise resources planning (ERP), human
resources (HR), and collaborative applications.
• On the customer side, there is no upfront investment
in servers or software licensing.
• On the provider side, costs are rather low, compared
with conventional hosting of user applications.
Service Models