Cloud computing is the new IT trend that is grabbing the industry magazine headlines, and although it is being positively embraced by many users, some are needlessly worried about security issues. Bringing together the three major trends of virtualisation, utility computing and software as a service (SaaS), cloud computing is still regarded with a degree of suspicion by some. However, as both the US and UK governments utilise the technology they at least have no doubts over its use. It is the combination of the three component parts of cloud computing that make it particularly appealing to users as they need little or no knowledge of the technology needed to operate it. First used to describe large ATM networks in the early 1990s, when used in the computing context ‘Cloud’ is describing the internet and the way that resources are used across its entirety. It involves the provision of services to users who don’t have to worry about any of the technical issues surrounding the service. Because resources can be pulled from across the internet it means that cloud computing solutions are entirely scalable and peak loads are easily accommodated. That allows users to go about their business without having to worry about allocation of CPU, storage or network bandwidth. The shared hosting infrastructure model in regular use today is limited by the physical constraints of the available hardware, usually at one bottleneck point, such as single server. However, cloud hosting has no such restrictions as it utilises the processing power of a series of servers in real time. A user of cloud hosting simply purchases as much processing capacity as they require from a resource that is virtually inexhaustible and therefore provides a seamless service regardless of peaks and troughs in visitor numbers. Intelligent systems simply ensure that load-balancing is applied across a series of servers, adding or removing them from the cluster as required providing an invisible transition for customers. The technology underpinning the infrastructure enables small and medium–sized enterprises to utilise web hosting architecture in a way that was only available a large corporate IT department a few years ago. Cloud technology is now utilised by major corporations and governments throughout the world. It is certainly no fad, and despite myths about its lack of security is almost as robust as any traditional system; it is dependent upon the quality of the software and operator. There are also varying types of cloud, such as an on-premise cloud or a virtual private cloud, which are as secure as the system operator wishes them to be as it is in a private environment. However you would be constrained to your pre-configured environment. Adam Singleton writes for a digital marketing agency. This article has been commissioned by a client of said agency. This article is not designed to promote, but should be considered professional content.
Cloud computing is changing the IT world in a way which is unprecedented in last decade. The economy of scale and predicable performance is pushing cloud computing across the enterprises. A significant part of the cloud-computing infrastructure available in world consists of reliable services delivered through data centers such as Amazon. In principle, cloud-computing customers do not own the physical infrastructure, instead avoiding capital expenditure by renting usage from a third-party provider. Although cloud computing is a very promising paradigm, still not every company would want to use public clouds. Especially for core applications and applications with sensitive data, enterprises lean towards private clouds. There are many technology options available today for cloud computing. VMware VMware is the industry’s first cloud operating system, transforming IT infrastructures into a private cloud. High availability, performance and reliability of VMware with cost-effective solutions are special advantages for small IT environments. VMware brings unique characteristics to cloud computing, designed to serve the needs of businesses that want production-level performance and reliability, on and off premise. VMware vSphere: Leveraging key technology advancements found in VMware vSphere, users get the assurance that applications can be managed, moved and operated in the cloud as they do onsite. VMware vSphere aggregates and holistically manages large pools of infrastructure—processors, storage and networking as a seamless, flexible and dynamic operating environment. VMware ESXi and VMWare Server: Besides vSphere, VMware also offers VMware ESXi, which can be used as initial virtualization platforms. Once user is convinced of the value, he can move to more robust VMware vSphere stack. Microsoft Microsoft’s cloud offerings have the Hyper-V and the Windows Azure Platform which is a development platform for ISVs to build applications on Hyper-V: Microsoft Hyper-V is a hypervisor based virtualization system that can be used for x64 computers. Hyper-V can be used to enable a very reliable and cost effective virtualization solution. Hyper-V supports mixed OS virtualization with Windows and Linux systems. In the latest Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 provides features like live migration and cluster shared volume support. Windows Azure platform: Windows Azure Platform offers a flexible, familiar environment for developers to create cloud applications and services. With Windows Azure, you can shorten your time to market and adapt as demand for your service grows. The OS component of Windows Azure is what provides the plumbing for development, service hosting and service management. Xen Xen is an open source cloud-computing project initiated by Citrix. Main goal of the project is to build open standards for virtualization management, improve the allocation of virtual workloads including transitioning workloads between datacenters, build a virtual switch, and enable massive cloud infrastructures. Latest offering Xen 4.0 adds significant memory and security optimizations that will drive virtualization infrastructure to an entirely new class of performance. As a result, virtualization is made suitable for all workloads, even network intensive and high performance computing applications that would have previously experienced compromised performance on any hypervisor.
Why the enterprises have suddenly started showing a keen interest in private cloud computing? The answer is simple – the future of IT lies in the private clouds. Private cloud computing offers the best of both worlds: safety and innovation. With private clouds, the IT providers can make elementary changes internally in how their IT infrastructure is deployed and run to get the benefits of cloud computing. Private clouds represent a paradigm shift in how services are delivered and paid for. With today’s economic uncertainty, private clouds services let you take advantage of the concept (and reap the benefits) while maintaining control of your own resources. Here are few key reasons for the end-users to build a cost-effective private cloud for their internal IT infrastructure Reduced CAPEX: With private cloud computing, you don’t need to own the infrastructure. You just hire it for a certain monthly fee thus eliminating any capital expenditure, while benefiting from economies of scale. The pricing ‘Pay-as-you-go’ model can benefit customers looking to bring specific application expertise in-house without committing to a large upfront investment. You pay only for the computing capacity you actually use – without buying new hardware in peak demand hours. This saves you lots of capital expenditure and empowers you to buy, deploy and run software without IT involvement. You gain on-demand access to enterprise-class infrastructure that is flexible enough to offer unmatched compatibility with your own internal IT platforms – all this at a monthly fixed fee. Scalability Edge: By leveragingprivate cloud computing services, you’re getting more flexibility and unprecedented control in allocating resources dynamically. Essentially, you’ll be drawing from a centralized, shared pool of server, networking and storage resources - quickly provisioning new resources or de-provisioning them, and you can quickly respond if there is an application request for more storage in a more flexible, highly dynamic, highly virtualized environment. You access a pool of resources that you can split up at a moment’s notice or power up and down as your needs change. Greater choice: The private cloud gives you something you always desire – Choices. Typically, private clouds are implemented in the enterprise’s data center and managed by internal resources. Now, you can exercise greater choices of how you want to run your applications and what you can apply from a service-level agreement standpoint to those applications. This will not just reduce your operational costs but also automate mundane routine tasks and improve business/IT alignment. Save Energy: Private cloud promotes ‘Green IT’. With private clouds, you can reduce power consumption, cooling and space usage and sustain the environment friendly IT. This helps you in saving lots of energy and allows you to work amid green IT environment. Responsive IT: Virtual infrastructure allows IT to respond quickly. Private cloud computing overcome all challenges like – slow IT, unresponsive IT and paperwork-ridden IT. You can easily test a new application in the private cloud to decide whether it fit your current needs. Earlier, you would have had to turn down the request because it had no room on the servers. The private cloud allows your IT infrastructure to respond quickly to automated policies. If you have decided that your business could also benefit from the promise of cloud computing, the next step is to select a service provider you can trust. NaviSite is a leading provider of cloud enabled enterprise hosting and application management services offering a comprehensive suite of customized IT-as-a-Service solutions. You can leverage NaviSite’s recognized experience and expertise in cloud-based enterprise solutions. Just Do It Now! – Reach out to NaviSite.
Study on Computing in the Cloud Felix Deepak Minj (HOD Information Tech. Shekhawati Group of Institution) Introduction: In traditional network diagram, the cloud always represented a fairly static view of an intermediary virtual area on the Internet. It basically had no real function other than passing data from one point to the other between servers on the Internet and client where we cloud setup our applications to run The cloud computing model changes this slightly. Instead of providing just a medium for messages to pass through between clients and severs, it tries to provide a number of services within the Internet “cloud” itself. These services can range from storage, computation, applications and even complete operating systems. All available as a service on the Internet which you can go ahead and use directly. The “Software_as_a_Servic” or SaaS concept is one of the major diving forces of cloud computing along with other concepts such as Web2.0, the web browser and mobile applications. Objective of the Study: 1. Purpose of the study is to virtualization of the environment. 2. Less expensive in context to server maintenance. 3. According to demand provide the application services and others. Methodology: In this paper relevant literature, information and data have been used from the published books, magazines like PCQuest, DeveloperIQ, Computer Today, InformationWeek, relevant web sites etc. Text: We can’t turn around these days without hearing “Cloud Computing”. So what is cloud computing? Is it the same old stuff with a new wrapper? Cloud computing is a development model leveraged by IT to reduce infrastructure costs and/or address capacity/scalability concerns. It is the infrastructure and model of deployment. Cloud computing is about how an application or service is deployed and delivered. Cloud computing is a deployment model leveraging on demand computing to scale and serve applications through a shared resource model. Are there different types of clouds? Yes, there are. There are public clouds like Amazon and Microsoft, and there are going to be private clouds as well. Because cloud computing is concerned with how applications and infrastructure resources are provisioned and delivered, location is really irrelevant in determining whether an architecture is or is not a cloud. There is also differentiation between cloud models; some are based heavily in virtualization and we deploy applications by pushing a virtual image of our applications and its environment into the cloud using web services. Other provides platforms upon which we develop the application and which are then packaged up and provisioned on demand through the provider’s custom environment. Scalability is an issue in all kinds of software development and computing. Dose this include cloud computing? Absolutely, there are basically two different kind of scalability such as horizontal and vertical. Horizontal scalability means the application can serve many concurrent users, which is easy and one of the benefits of cloud computing. That’s the job of load balancing and application delivery solutions and should be taken care of by the cloud. Then there is vertical scalability, which means that the application continues to perform consistently as load increases, and that is just note something the cloud provides. What about security when it comes to cloud computing? Secure cording is an absolute requirement for cloud computing, as is a wide variety of application and network layer security in the cloud computing infrastructure. Secure coding practice are the best way to prevent exploits of application logic and unauthorized access while firewalls, web application firewalls, network(IP) and transport layer(TCP) security solutions are all necessary to prevent as many attacks as possible from penetrating the outer rim of the cloud. Secure remote access to applications and services in the cloud, allowing for more sensitive applications to execute in the cloud and be accessed from anywhere while protecting the communication. Cloud computing offers virtually unlimited, on demand computing resources. Our applications now live in a new platform- a computing cloud. In the cloud, our applications take advantages of the seemingly limitless processor cycles, memory storage, and network bandwidth along with extensive software capabilities. Our applications only pay for what they use. Cloud computing offers a range of application services that from a new platform-an Internet operating system suitable for cost effective, dynamic, and Internet-scale solutions. An Internet operating system offers the scale and services required to meet the requirements of a dynamic, global, software application. In an infrastructure cloud environment, the situation is radically different. Our data and processing power can get moved at win from location to location, possibly with varying levels of physical access controls. The underlying virtualization system of some infrastructure cloud providers may not yet be capable of providing strong assurances that virtual machines sharing a hyper visior are in fact separated and immune from attack. Cloud providers-in particular, the infrastructure variety-tend to be opaque computing services offering little visibility into their underlying architectures and technologies. Cloud computing is the natural evolution of the application service provider (ASP) from the late nineties and software as a service (SaaS) strategies from more recent year. Vendors that provide cloud computing services supply the data centers required to host virtualized environments for their customers. Business no longer need the same capital expenditure to up and running and they can buy additional cloud computing resources on demand to meet the requirements of increased server load or peak periods in their business. Getting into the cloud: Currently we can create cloud applications through two major implementations: 1- Amazon 2- Google Amazon: Amazon has a number of cloud offering. The Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is an offering that allows users to request “virtual machines” in the cloud. Once the request is met, the user can “provision” these virtual cloud servers to run any software they want. This is completely dynamic in the sense that the user has control over how many virtual instances he wants to provision and run at a particular point in time. The servers can run anything from OpenSolaris, Linux to Windows Server 2003. Other services that Amazon has include S3 (Simple storage service)- a service that lets users or applications use unlimited storage for their files and SimpleDB a distributed database system that can be used in conjunction with S3 and EC2. All of these services are available through programming models to enable end users the ability to use them in their own applications as well. Google: Google provides two different sets of services in the cloud computing world. the first is the famous Google Apps- a combination of services that users can use as part of their own domain to enable common functionality. The different parts of the Google network- Gmail, Calendar, Talk, Sites and Docs- are combined into a packaged offering that users can subscribe to in an enterprise. This enables users to have their organization’s data stored up in Google’s “cloud” and make it accessible almost anywhere. The other service that Google offers is the App engine. This is an online application frame work where users can host their own applications. However, the Google App Engine only supports a limited version of python as their programming frame work. It also has a database like construct with an SQL like language to be able to use to program applications. Conclusion: There are many other companies in this playing field as well-IBM, HP, Sales Force-to name just a few, who are heavily investing in this model of computing. Since cloud computing reduces the infrastructure requirements and budgets that an enterprise needs to host their applications or data, this model seems to be getting more popular. One doesn’t need to worry about purchasing and provisioning hardware and software integrating it into the network and other headaches. Simply request the service or update we want and it gets done for us transparently. Cloud computing can help us or at least manage our infrastructure costs better and allow availability of our application and data over the Internet. However, one must be able to ensure that data is available anytime one needs it and having good software and a seamless connectivity to the service is essential in this regard. References and Bibliography: 1. InformationWeek Published from United Business Media 2. Dr. Dobb’s Published from United Business Media 3. PCQuest, Published from Mumbai 4. DeveloperIQ, Published from New Delhi 5. Computer Today, Published from New Delhi
Cloud computing is a term that has been finding its way into information technology related news on a regular basis for the past few years. New initiatives, new applications and new technological developments have kept this technology at the forefront of IT and led to exciting new changes in the way enterprise class computing is seen. However, the concepts and ideas surrounding cloud computing continue to confuse most common users. The “Cloud” continues to stump a large contingent of IT professionals too as there is lot of conflicting information about the technology floating around on the internet. To put things in better perspective, cloud computing is a relatively new technology that virtualizes the use of applications through the medium of the internet. Rather than physical installation of software and other applications on computer systems, cloud computing calls for installation and maintenance of the same applications on a single, centralized server. Multiple users are able to access and share this centrally stored application and information and use it in real time to achieve results not just quickly but also more efficiently. The most typical examples of cloud computing are found in common business applications that were earlier used through personal computers but are now used through the internet. While application data in traditional software was stored locally on the machine, cloud computing takes this data and stores it on an online server. While the applications of cloud computing are wide and divided, they can be broadly classified into seven categories: 1. Software as a Service 2. Platform as a Service 3. Utility Computing 4. Web Services 5. Managed Service Providers 6. Internet Integration and 7. Service Commerce Most IT users at enterprise and individual levels have already started using cloud computing to some extent in their day-to-day tasks. However, to understand the full potential of this new development, cloud computing education and training can come in handy. By attending even a single day cloud computing class, users can grasp the full extent to which they can utilize this technology in their day-to-day tasks and gain maximum benefits from it in terms of productivity and turnaround time. A cloud computing class would also allow users to learn the history of this technology and explain to them the basic idea behind this concept. Cloud computing is based on inspiration drawn from the telecom industry, which came up with the concept of Virtual Private Network (VPN) to meet the demands of long distance telephony at lower costs. By offering shared usage of bandwidth through optimum load balancing, VPN allowed telecom providers to cut cost while expanding their service range. Some of the earliest players in cloud computing have been, Amazon and Microsoft, though commercial cloud computing was introduced by a lesser known company named Loudcloud. Microsoft and Amazon though can be credited with the growth in usage of the technology and also the increase in demand for cloud computing education.
