Introduction To Cloud Computing

Introduction to Cloud Computing 2008-08 Liming Liu [email_address]

Content

What is cloud computing

Cloud computing discriminate

Cloud computing technology

Cloud computing products and market

Cloud Computing – new IT buzzword

Cloud computing, at backside of this buzzword, is a concept like the flower in the glass. Every enterprise and person, want to explain this concept by their own benefits. But, if give a neutral definition to it, begin it here.

Cloud computing definition

Cloud computing is a resource delivery and usage model, it means get resource (Hardware, software)via network. The network of providing resource is called ‘Cloud’. The hardware resource in the ‘Cloud’ seems scalable infinitely and can be used whenever.

Cloud computing and technology

New advances in processors, virtualization technology, distributed storage, broadband Internet access , automated management and fast, inexpensive server s have all combined to make cloud computing a compelling paradigm.This vast process power is usually got with a distributed, large-scale server cluster and server virtualization software.

Cloud computing impact

As a result, cloud computing has the potential to upend the software industry entirely, as applications are purchased, licensed and run over the network instead of a user's desktop. This shift will put data center s and their administrators at the center of the distributed network, as processing power, electricity, bandwidth and storage are all managed remotely. It affects not only business models, but the underlying architecture of how we develop, deploy, run and deliver applications.

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Cloud computing’s brother buzzwords

Cloud computing is becoming one of the next industry buzz words. And it has more or less relation with these words: grid computing, utility computing, virtualization, server cluster, Dedicated server, Colocation. Cloud computing infrastructure usually use virtualization technology, and is built based on a server cluster, have nature relation to grid computing and utility computing, and is use to compete with Dedicated server and Colocation.

Utility computing

Utility computing is a business model of providing computing resource ， user get and use the computing resource from service provider and pay for practically used resource. To say it simply, it is a price model based on resource usage quantity. The main benefit of utility computing is better economics. Corporate data centers are notoriously underutilized, with resources such as servers often idle 85 percent of the time. This is due to overprovisioning — buying more hardware than is needed on average in order to handle peaks (such as the opening of the Wall Street trading day or the holiday shopping season), to handle expected future loads and to prepare for unanticipated surges in demand. Utility computing allows companies to only pay for the computing resources they need, when they need them.

Comparison of Utility Computing and Cloud Computing

Utility computing is a business model, it is a type of price model to deliver application infrastructure resource. Cloud computing is a computing model, relates to the way we design, build, deploy and run applications that operate in a sharing resources and boasting the ability to dynamically grow, shrink and self-heal. Utility computing is often need a cloud computing infrastructure, but not must need. Sameness, above the cloud computing, we can adopt utility computing, and, we can adopt other price model.

Monitor Meter Billing Pay Utility computing Cloud computing

Distributed Computing

Distributed computing deals with hardware and software systems containing more than one processing element or storage element, concurrent processes, or multiple programs, running under a loosely or tightly controlled regime .In distributed computing ， a program is split up into parts that run simultaneously on multiple computers communicating over a network. Distributed computing is a form of parallel computing , but parallel computing is most commonly used to describe program parts running simultaneously on multiple processors in the same computer. Both types of processing require dividing a program into parts that can run simultaneously, but distributed programs often must deal with heterogeneous environments, network links of varying latencies, and unpredictable failures in the network or the computers.

Grid computing

Grid computing is a term for either of two broad subcategories of distributed computing : 1 Online computation or storage offered as a service supported by a pool of distributed computing resources, also known as utility computing , on-demand computing, or cloud computing . Data grids provide controlled sharing and management of large amounts of distributed data, often used in combination with computational grids. 2 The creation of a "virtual supercomputer" composed of a network of loosely-coupled computers, acting in concert to perform very large tasks. This technology has been applied to computationally-intensive scientific, mathematical, and academic problems through volunteer computing , and it is used in commercial enterprises for such diverse applications as drug discovery , economic forecasting , seismic analysis , and back-office data processing in support of e-commerce and web services .

Difference between Cloudcomputing and grid computing

Grid computing emphasizes on resource sharing, every grid node can apply for resource from other nodes, and every node should contribute resource to the grid. The focus of grid computing is on the ability of moving a workload to the location of theneeded computing resources, which are mostly remote and are readily available for use.Grids also require applications to conform to the grid software interfaces.

Cloud computing emphasize on proprietary, every user out of the cloud can get it’s own private resource from the cloud, and the cloud resource are provided by the specific service provider, the user need not contribute its resource. In a cloud environment, computing resouces, such as servers, can be dynamically shaped or carved out from its underlying hardware infrastructure and made available to a workload. In addition, while a cloud does support grid, a cloud can also support nongrid environments,such as a three-tier Web architecture running traditional or Web 2.0 applications.

Grid computing emphasizes on computing sensitive task, and is difficult to automated scale. Cloud computing emphasizes on transactional application, a great amount of separate request, and can scale automatically or semiautomatically.

Computer cluster A computer cluster is a group of coupled computers that work together closely so that in many respects they can be viewed as though they are a single computer. The components of a cluster are commonly, but not always, connected to each other through fast local area networks . Clusters are usually deployed to improve performance and/or availability over that provided by a single computer, while typically being much more cost-effective than single computers of comparable speed or availability. [1] Grids tend to be more loosely coupled , heterogeneous, and geographically dispersed, grid computers do not fully trust each other.

Virtualization

Virtualization is a broad term that refers to the abstraction of computer resources. Virtualization hides the physical characteristics of computing resources from their users, be they applications , or end users . [1] This includes making a single physical resource (such as a server , an operating system , an application, or storage device ) appear to function as multiple virtual resources; it can also include making multiple physical resources (such as storage devices or servers) appear as a single virtual resource. [2]

Virtualization technology is a aggregative term of technical means and methods to implement virtualization. It can be divided to many types based on objects: storage virtualization, computing virtualization, network virtualization. Computing virtualization include ： OS level virtualization, application level virtualization, hyper visor. Hypervisor include: host vm and guest vm.

Cloud computing break out

Compared to its brother buzzwords, cloud computing is just beginning. Trends in usage of the terms from Google searches shows Cloud Computing is a relatively new term introduced in the past year. There has also been a decline in general interest of Grid, Utility and Distributed computing.

Cloud Computing and Virtualization are the next hot hosting platforms; the Dedicated server term is slowly starting to lose ground vs. Virtualization and Cloud Computing.

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What cloud computing means to service provider?

Fast Provision

Reduce servers scale

Increase resource utilization rate

Improve management efficiency

Lower maintenance cost

Location of infrastructure in areas with lower costs of real estate and electricity

Provide business continuity service

Improve management efficiency

Improve service levels

Complex architecture

Change of business model and faith

What cloud computing means to suers?

Lower client workload

Lower Total Cost Ownership

Separation of infrastructure maintenance duties from domain-specific application development

 Separation of application code from physical resources

Not have to purchase assets for one-time or infrequent intensive computing tasks

Expand resource on-demand

Make the application have high availability

Quickly deploy application

Pay per use

Cloud computing infrastructure features

Self-healing

Multi-tenancy

Virtualized

Linearly Scalable

Resource Monitor and measure

Resource registration and discovery

Cloud computing infrastructure architecture The physical hardware layer is virtualized to provide a flexible adaptive platform to improve resource utilization. The keys to new enterprise data center infrastructure services are the next two layers, the virtualization environment and management layer. The combination of these two layers ensure that resources in a data center are efficiently managed and can be provisioned, deployed, and configured rapidly.

Difficulties for cloud computing

Continuous high availability

Cosistency

Interoperability and standarlization

Scalability of all components

Data secrecy

Legal and political problem of data store and translation across regions

Performance issue

Difficulty customizing

Organizational obstacle

Potencial issues in cloud computing

Privileged user access.

Regulatory compliance.

Data location.

Data segregation.

Recovery.

Investigative support.

Long-term viability.

Content

10 examples of entpereises using the clouds

The NY Times Amazon EC2

Nasdaq Amazon S3

Major League Baseball Joyent

ESPN Rightscale using Amazon EC2

Hasbro Amazon EC2

British Telecom 3Tera

Taylor Woodrow Google Apps

CSS Amazon EC2

Activision Amazon EC2

Business Objects (A SAP Company) Rightscale using Amazon EC2

Cloud computing market Hardware provider Cloud technology enabler Infrastructure as a service Platform as a service Software as a service Everything is a service

Cloud computing infrastructure tech&solution provider

3Tera - AppLogic grid OS used as cloud computing platform by service providers and enterprises

Appistry - Cloud computing middleware - Enables easily scalable cloud computing in the enterprise.

Cassatt - Cassatt Active Response platform enables administrators to set policies to power physical and virtual servers safely on and off and pool their computing resources.

CloudHan - Cloud tech and infrastructure consultant, in China.

CloudScale Networks - Cloud enabler. Currently in private ALPHA only

Enomaly Inc - Service Provider & Cloud Enabler - Developer of the Enomalism Elastic Computing Platform & Elastic Drive

Q-layer - provides software for data centers that enables cloud computing, support VSAN, VLAN, VPDC, currently support VMware ESX.

Skytap - IaaS service optimized for QA, Training, Demo, and Ops Testing. Supports VMware, Xen hypervisors & Windows, Linux & Solaris OS guests.

Cloud computing infrastructure provider

Agathon Group - Cloud provider. Services include highly available VPS, virtual private datacenters and ready-to-use LAMP stacks. Self-service ordering. Custom development and managed services available.

Amazon Web Services - Amazon EC2/S3 (Hardware-a-a-S & Cloud Storage)

CohesiveFT - CohesiveFT Elastic Server On-Demand

ElasticHosts - UK-based instant, on-demand servers in the cloud

Flexiscale - Another instant provisioner of web servers with some advanced features like auto-scaling coming soon.

GoGrid - instant, on-demand servers offering "control in the cloud". Deploy Windows/Linux servers via web-interface in minutes

GridLayer - Cloud Provider. A service by Layered Technologies that delivers Virtual Private Datacenters and virtual private servers from grids of commodity servers

LayeredTechnologies - Cloud Provider. provider of on-demand hosting and cloud and utility computing solutions through its brand GridLayer

Mosso - Rackspace's cloud hosting service

Newservers - Instant provisioning of web servers either Windows or Linux

Cloud computing Paas provider

Bungee Connect - Provides end to end tools and systems required to develop, deploy and host web applications (Platform as a Service)

Coherence - Oracle Coherence Data Grid for EC2 and other cloud platforms

Force.com - Salesforce.com's application development platform (PaaS)

GigaSpaces - middleware for the cloud, "cloudware"

Google AppEngine - (PaaS)Now support python

Heroku - Ruby on Rails in their Cloud

Qrimp - An AJAX based PaaS

RightScale - RightScale provides a platform and expertise that enable companies to create scalable web applications running on Amazon’s Web Services that are reliable, easy to manage, and cost less

Service provider based on Cloud computing