Report on CLOUD COMPUTING

Submitted By:

Sanesh Sivan
1.INTRODUCTION

Cloud computing is the next natural step in the evolution of on-demand

information technology services and products. To a large extent cloud
computing will be based on virtualized resources. The idea of cloud
computing is based on a very fundamental principal of `reusability of IT
capabilities`. The difference that cloud computing brings compared to
traditional concepts of “grid computing”, “distributed computing‖, “utility
computing‖, or “autonomic computing‖ is to broaden horizons across
organizational boundaries.

Though many cloud computing architectures and deployments are powered

by grids, based on autonomic characteristics and consumed on the basis of
utilities billing, the concept of a cloud is fairly distinct and complementary to
the concepts of grid, SaaS, Utility Computing etc. In theory, cloud computing
promises availability of all required hardware, software, platform,
applications, infrastructure and storage with an ownership of just an internet
connection. People can access the information that they need from any
device with an Internet connection including mobile and handheld phones
rather than being chained to the desktop. It also means lower costs, since
there is no need to install software or hardware. Cloud computing used to
posting and sharing photos on orkut, instant messaging with friends
maintaining and upgrading business technology
Concepts

A powerful underlying and enabling concept is computing through service-

oriented architectures (SOA) - delivery of an integrated and orchestrated
suite of functions to an end-user through composition of both loosely and
tightly coupled functions, or services - often network based.

Related concepts are component-based system engineering, orchestration

of different services through workflows, and virtualization.

Cyber infrastructure

Cyber infrastructure makes applications dramatically easier to develop and

deploy, thus expanding the feasible scope of applications possible within
budget and organizational constraints, and shifting the scientist’s and
engineer’s effort away from information technology development and
concentrating it on scientific and engineering research. Cyber infrastructure
also increases efficiency, quality, and reliability by capturing commonalities
among application needs, and facilitates the efficient sharing of equipment
and services.

Today, almost any business or major activity uses, or relies in some form, on
IT and IT services. These services need to be enabling and appliance-like,
and there must be an economy of- scale for the total-cost-of-ownership to be
better than it would be without cyber infrastructure. Technology needs to
improve end-user productivity and reduce Technology-driven overhead

Service-Oriented Architecture

SOA is not a new concept, although it again has been receiving considerable
attention in recent years [e.g., Bel08, IBM08a]. Examples of some of the first
network-based service-oriented architectures are remote procedure calls
(RPC), DCOM and Object Request Brokers (ORBs) based on the CORBA
specifications . A more recent example are so called “Grid Computing
architectures and solutions . In an SOA environment end-users request an
IT service (or an integrated collection of such services) at the desired
functional, quality and capacity level, and receive the response at the time
requested or at a specified later time. Service discovery, brokering, and
reliability are important .Goal of the SOA is that creating an architecture in
which services are able to communicate using http protocol It is expected
that in the next 10 years, service-based solutions will be a major vehicle for
delivery of information and other IT assisted functions at both individual and
organizational levels.

e.g., software applications, web-based services, personal and business

“desktop computing.

Cloud Architecture

Cloud architecture the systems architecture of the software systems

involved in the delivery of cloud computing, comprises hardware and
software designed by a cloud architect who typically works for a cloud
integrator. It typically involves multiple cloud components communicating
with each other over application programming interfaces, usually web
services. This closely resembles the Unix philosophy of having multiple
programs doing one thing well and working together over universal
interfaces. Complexity is controlled and the resulting systems are more
manageable than their monolithic counterparts. Cloud architecture extends
to the client, where web browsers and/or software applications access cloud
applications. Cloud storage architecture is loosely coupled, where metadata
operations are centralized enabling the data nodes to scale into the
hundreds, each independently delivering data to applications or users
Fig 3 Cloud Architecture

Cloud –Types

Public cloud:
Public cloud or external cloud describes cloud computing in the traditional
mainstream. Public clouds are run by third parties, and applications from
different customers are likely to be mixed together on the cloud’s servers,
storage systems, and networks. A public cloud provides services to multiple
customers.

Hybrid cloud:

Hybrid clouds combine both public and private cloud models. This is most
often seen with the use of storage clouds to support Web 2.0 applications.

Private cloud:

Private clouds are built for the exclusive use of one client, providing the
utmost control over data, security, and quality of service (Figure 4). The
company owns the infrastructure and has control over how applications are
deployed on it. Private clouds can be built and managed by a company’s own
IT organization or by a cloud provider.

Cloud computing products and services can be classified into 4 major

categories:

They are

1. Application as service ( AaaS)

2. Platform as a Service (PaaS)

3. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

4. Software as a Service (SaaS)

1. Application as s service (AaaS): These are the first kind of cloud computing
services that came into being. Under this, a service is made available to an
end-user. The end-user is asked to create an account with the service
provider and start using the application. One of first famous application was
web-based email service by hotmail started in 1996. Scores of such services
are available now on the web.

2. Platform as a Service (PaaS): Cloud vendors are companies that offer

cloud computing services and products. One of the services that they
provide is called PaaS. Under this a computing platform such as operating
system is provided to a customer or end user on a monthly rental basis.
Some of the major cloud computing vendor are Amazon, Microsoft, Google
etc

3. Infrastructure as a service: The cloud computing vendors offer

infrastructure as a service. One may avail hardware services such as
processors, memory, networks etc on agreed basis for specific duration and
price.

4. Software as a service (SaaS): Software package such as CRM or CAD/CAM

can be accessed under cloud computing scheme. Here a customer upon
registration is allowed to use software accessible through net and use it for
his or his business process. The related data and work may be stored on
local machines or with the service providers. SaaS services may be available
on rental basis or on per use basis.
Component

The key to a SOA framework that supports workflows is componentization of

its services, an ability to support a range of couplings among workflow
building blocks, fault-tolerance in its data- and process-aware service-based
delivery, and an ability to audit processes, data and results, i.e., collect and
use provenance information. Component-based approach is characterized by
reusability (elements can be re-used in other workflows), substitutability
(alternative implementations are easy to insert, very precisely specified
interfaces are available, run-time component replacement mechanisms
exist, there is ability to verify and validate substitutions, etc), extensibility
and scalability (ability to readily extend system component pool and to scale
it, increase capabilities of individual components, have an extensible and
scalable architecture that can automatically discover new functionalities and
resources, etc),customizability (ability to customize generic features to the
needs of a particular scientific domain and problem), and composability
(easy construction of more complex functional solutions using basic
components, reasoning about such compositions, etc.). There are other
characteristics that also are very important. Those include reliability and
availability of the components and services, the cost of the services,
security, total cost of ownership, economy of scale, and so on.In the context
of cloud computing we distinguish many categories of components. From
differentiated and undifferentiated hardware, to general-purpose and
specialized software and applications, to real and virtual “images, to
environments, to no-root Differentiated resources, to workflow-based
environments and collections of services, and soon.
 Virtualization

Virtualization is another very useful concept. It allows abstraction and

isolation of lower-level functionalities and underlying hardware. This enables
portability of higher-level functions and sharing and/or aggregation of the
physical resources. The virtualization concept has been around in some form
since 1960s (e.g., in IBM mainframe systems). Since then, the concept has
matured considerably and it has been applied to all aspects of computing –
memory, storage, processors, software, networks, as well as services that IT
offers. It is the combination of the growing needs and the recent advances in
the IT architectures and solutions that is now bringing the virtualization to
the true commodity level. Virtualization, through its economy of scale, and
its ability to offer very advanced and complex IT services at a reasonable
cost, is poised to become, along with wireless and highly distributed and
pervasive computing devices, such as sensors and personal cell-based
access devices, the driving technology behind the next waive in IT growth
.Not surprisingly there are dozens of virtualization products, and a number of
small and large companies that make them. Some examples in the
operating systems and software applications space are VMware1, Xen - an
open source Linux-based product developed by XenSource2, and Microsoft
virtualization products, to mention a few. Major IT players have also shown a
renewed interest in the technology. Classical storage players such as EMC10,
NetApp11, IBM12 and Hitachi13 have not been standing still either. In
addition, the network virtualization market is teeming with activity

Users
The most important Cloud entity, and the principal quality driver and
constraining influence is, of course, the user. The value of a solutions
depends very much on the view it has of its end-user requirements and user
categories.

There four broad sets of nonexclusive user categories:

System or Cyber infrastructure (CI) developers, developers (authors) of

different component services and underlying applications, technology and
domain personnel that integrates basic services into composite services and
their orchestrations (workflows) and delivers those to end-users, and finally
users of simple and composite services. User categories also include
domain specific groups, and indirect users such as stakeholders, policy
makers, and so on. Functional and usability requirements derive, in most
part, directly from the user profiles.

Working Of Cloud Computing:

Cloud Computing system can be divided it into two sections: the front end
and the back end. They connect to each other through a network, usually the
Internet. Thefront end is the side the computer user, or client, sees.The back
end is the "cloud" section of the system. On the back end there are various
computers,servers and data storage systems that create the "cloud" of
computing services.A central server administers the system, monitoring
traffic and client demands to ensure everything runs smoothly. It followsa set
of rules called protocols Servers and remote computers do most of the work
and store the data.
Cloud Computing in the Real World

1. Time Machine

Times machine is a New York Times project in which one can read any issue
from volume 1, Number 1 of The New York Daily Times, on September 18,
1851 through to The New York Times of December 30, 1922. They made it
such that one can choose a date in history and flip electronically through the
pages, displayed with their original look and feel. Here’s what they did. They
scanned all their public domain articles from 1851 to 1992 into TIFF files.
They converted it into PDF files and put them online. Using 100 Linux
computers, the job took about 24 hours. Then a coding error was discovered
that required the job be rerun. That’s when their software team decided that
the job of maintaining this much data was too much to do in-house. So they
made use of cloud computing services to do the work. All the content was
put in the cloud, in Amazon. They made use of 100 instances of Amazon EC2
and completed the whole work in less than 24 hours. They uploaded all the
TIFF files into the cloud and made a program in Hadoop which does the
whole job. Using Amazon.com's EC2 computing platform, the Times ran a
PDF conversion app that converted that 4TB of TIFF data into 1.5TB of PDF
files. The PDF files were such that they were fully searchable. The image
manipulation and the search ability of the software were done using cloud
computing services.

2. IBM Google University Academic Initiative

Google and IBM came up with an initiative to advance large-scale distributed

computing by providing hardware, software, and services to universities.
Their idea was to prepare students "to harness the potential of modern
computing systems," the companies will provide universities with hardware,
software, and services to advance training in large-scale distributed
computing. The two companies aim to reduce the cost of distributed
computing research, thereby enabling academic institutions and their
students to more easily contribute to this emerging computing paradigm.
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, said in a statement. "In order to most
effectively serve the long-term interests of our users, it is imperative that
students are adequately equipped Cloud Computing to harness the potential
of modern computing systems and for researchers to be able to innovate
ways to address emerging problems." The first university to join the
initiative is the University of Washington. Carnegie-Mellon University, MIT,
Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the
University of Maryland are also participating in the program. As part of the
initiative, Google and IBM are providing a cluster of several hundred
computers -- Google's custom servers and IBM BladeCenter and System
servers. Over time, the companies expect the cluster to surpass 1,600
processors. The Linux-based servers will run open source software including
Xen's virtualization system and Hadoop, an open source implementation of
Google's distributed file system that's managed by the Apache Software
Foundation. Students working with the cluster will have access to a Creative
Commons-licensed curriculum for massively parallel computing developed by
Google and the University of Washington.

3. SmugMug

SmugMug is an online photo hosting application which is fully based on cloud

computing services. They don’t own any hard drives. All their storage is
based in the Amazon S3 instances.

6.4. Nasdaq

NASDAQ which had lots of stock and fund data wanted to make extra
revenue selling historic data for those stocks and funds. But for this offering,
called Market Replay, the company didn't want to worry about optimizing its
databases and servers to handle the new load. So it turned to Amazon's S3
service to host the data, and created a lightweight reader app that let users
pull in the required data. The traditional approach wouldn't have gotten off
the ground economically. NASDAQ took its market data and created flat files
for every entity, each holding enough data for a 10-minute replay of the
stock's or fund's price changes, on a second-by-second basis. It adds
100,000 files per day to the several million it started with.

Merits & Demerits:

Merits:
Cloud enabler technologies like utility computing, Grid Computing, RTI, web
infrastructure and others are cloud enabled.

1. Infrastructure service providers are taking advantage of the Cloud

services.

2. Information services, entertainment-oriented services such as video on

demand, simple business services such as customer authentication or
identity management and contextual services such as location or mapping
services are positioned well by using the service.

3. Other services, such as corporate processes (for example, billing,

deduction management and mortgage calculation) and transactional
services (for example, fiscal transactions), would take longer to reach the
cloud and the mainstream.

4. Cloud computing infrastructures allows efficient use of their IT

hardware and software investments

5. A cloud infrastructure can be a cost efficient model for delivering

information services, reducing IT management complexity.

6. The Cloud makes it possible to launch Web 2.0 applications quickly and to
scale up applications as much as needed when needed.

Demerits:

Stored data might not be secure: With cloud computing, all our data is
stored on the cloud. The unauthorized users gain access to our confidential
data. Dependent on internet connection:Internet connectivity isn’t
completely stable and reliable. It’s not platform agnostic:Most clouds force
participants to rely on a single platform or host only one type of product. Can
be slow:Even on a fast connection,web based application scan
sometimes be slower than accessing a similar software program on our
desktop PC