UNIT 3 Cloud Platform Architecture

Cloud Computing and Service Models

Service Models

Cloud computing is based on service models. These are categorized into three basic
service models which are -

 Infrastructure-as–a-Service (IaaS)
 Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
 Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
Anything-as-a-Service (XaaS) is yet another service model, which includes Network-
as-a-Service, Business-as-a-Service, Identity-as-a-Service, Database-as-a-
Service or Strategy-as-a-Service.
The Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is the most basic level of service. Each of the
service models inherit the security and management mechanism from the underlying
model, as shown in the following diagram:

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
IaaS provides access to fundamental resources such as physical machines, virtual
machines, virtual storage, etc.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
PaaS provides the runtime environment for applications, development and deployment
tools, etc.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
SaaS model allows to use software applications as a service to end-users.

History of Cloud Computing

The concept of Cloud Computing came into existence in the year 1950 with
implementation of mainframe computers, accessible via thin/static clients. Since then,
cloud computing has been evolved from static clients to dynamic ones and from software
to services. The following diagram explains the evolution of cloud computing:
Benefits

Cloud Computing has numerous advantages. Some of them are listed below -

 One can access applications as utilities, over the Internet.

 One can manipulate and configure the applications online at any time.
 It does not require to install a software to access or manipulate cloud application.
 Cloud Computing offers online development and deployment tools, programming
runtime environment through PaaS model.
 Cloud resources are available over the network in a manner that provide platform
independent access to any type of clients.
 Cloud Computing offers on-demand self-service. The resources can be used
without interaction with cloud service provider.
 Cloud Computing is highly cost effective because it operates at high efficiency
with optimum utilization. It just requires an Internet connection
 Cloud Computing offers load balancing that makes it more reliable.

Risks related to Cloud Computing

Although cloud Computing is a promising innovation with various benefits in the world of
computing, it comes with risks. Some of them are discussed below:
Security and Privacy

It is the biggest concern about cloud computing. Since data management and
infrastructure management in cloud is provided by third-party, it is always a risk to
handover the sensitive information to cloud service providers.

Although the cloud computing vendors ensure highly secured password protected
accounts, any sign of security breach may result in loss of customers and businesses.

Lock In
It is very difficult for the customers to switch from one Cloud Service Provider
(CSP) to another. It results in dependency on a particular CSP for service.

Isolation Failure

This risk involves the failure of isolation mechanism that separates storage, memory, and
routing between the different tenants.

Management Interface Compromise

In case of public cloud provider, the customer management interfaces are accessible
through the Internet.

Insecure or Incomplete Data Deletion

It is possible that the data requested for deletion may not get deleted. It happens
because either of the following reasons

 Extra copies of data are stored but are not available at the time of deletion
 Disk that stores data of multiple tenants is destroyed.

Characteristics of Cloud Computing

There are four key characteristics of cloud computing. They are shown in the following
diagram:
On Demand Self Service

Cloud Computing allows the users to use web services and resources on demand. One
can logon to a website at any time and use them.

Broad Network Access

Since cloud computing is completely web based, it can be accessed from anywhere and
at any time.

Resource Pooling

Cloud computing allows multiple tenants to share a pool of resources. One can share
single physical instance of hardware, database and basic infrastructure.

Rapid Elasticity

It is very easy to scale the resources vertically or horizontally at any time. Scaling of
resources means the ability of resources to deal with increasing or decreasing demand.

The resources being used by customers at any given point of time are automatically
monitored.

Measured Service

In this service cloud provider controls and monitors all the aspects of cloud service.
Resource optimization, billing, and capacity planning etc. depend on it.

Public Cloud Platforms,

Public Cloud allows systems and services to be easily accessible to general public. The
IT giants such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft offer cloud services via Internet. The
Public Cloud Model is shown in the diagram below.
Benefits

There are many benefits of deploying cloud as public cloud model. The following diagram
shows some of those benefits:

Cost Effective
Since public cloud shares same resources with large number of customers it turns out
inexpensive.

Reliability
The public cloud employs large number of resources from different locations. If any of
the resources fails, public cloud can employ another one.

Flexibility

The public cloud can smoothly integrate with private cloud, which gives customers a
flexible approach.

Location Independence
Public cloud services are delivered through Internet, ensuring location independence.

Utility Style Costing

Public cloud is also based on pay-per-use model and resources are accessible whenever
customer needs them.

High Scalability

Cloud resources are made available on demand from a pool of resources, i.e., they can
be scaled up or down according the requirement.

Disadvantages

Here are some disadvantages of public cloud model:

Low Security
In public cloud model, data is hosted off-site and resources are shared publicly,
therefore does not ensure higher level of security.

Less Customizable

It is comparatively less customizable than private cloud.

Service Oriented Architecture

A Service-Oriented Architecture or SOA is a design pattern which is designed to build

distributed systems that deliver services to other applications through the protocol.
It is only a concept and not limited to any programming language or platform.

What is Service?
A service is a well-defined, self-contained function that represents a unit of
functionality. A service can exchange information from another service. It is not
dependent on the state of another service. It uses a loosely coupled, message-based
communication model to communicate with applications and other services.

Service Connections
The figure given below illustrates the service-oriented architecture. Service
consumer sends a service request to the service provider, and the service provider
sends the service response to the service consumer. The service connection is
understandable to both the service consumer and service provider.

Service-Oriented Terminologies
Let's see some important service-oriented terminologies:
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o Services - The services are the logical entities defined by one or more
published interfaces.
o Service provider - It is a software entity that implements a service
specification.
o Service consumer - It can be called as a requestor or client that calls a
service provider. A service consumer can be another service or an end-user
application.
o Service locator - It is a service provider that acts as a registry. It is
responsible for examining service provider interfaces and service locations.
o Service broker - It is a service provider that pass service requests to one or
more additional service providers.

Characteristics of SOA
The services have the following characteristics:

o They are loosely coupled.

o They support interoperability.
o They are location-transparent
o They are self-contained.

Components of service-oriented architecture

The service-oriented architecture stack can be categorized into two parts - functional
aspects and quality of service aspects.
Functional aspects

The functional aspect contains:

o Transport - It transports the service requests from the service consumer to

the service provider and service responses from the service provider to the
service consumer.
o Service Communication Protocol - It allows the service provider and the
service consumer to communicate with each other.
o Service Description - It describes the service and data required to invoke it.
o Service - It is an actual service.
o Business Process - It represents the group of services called in a particular
sequence associated with the particular rules to meet the business
requirements.
 o Service Registry - It contains the description of data which is used by service
providers to publish their services.

Quality of Service aspects

The quality of service aspects contains:

o Policy - It represents the set of protocols according to which a service provider

make and provide the services to consumers.
o Security - It represents the set of protocols required for identification and
authorization.
o Transaction - It provides the surety of consistent result. This means, if we use
the group of services to complete a business function, either all must
complete or none of the complete.
o Management - It defines the set of attributes used to manage the services.

Advantages of SOA
SOA has the following advantages:

o Easy to integrate - In a service-oriented architecture, the integration is a

service specification that provides implementation transparency.
o Manage Complexity - Due to service specification, the complexities get
isolated, and integration becomes more manageable.
o Platform Independence - The services are platform-independent as they can
communicate with other applications through a common language.
o Loose coupling - It facilitates to implement services without impacting other
applications or services.
o Parallel Development - As SOA follows layer-based architecture, it provides
parallel development.
o Available - The SOA services are easily available to any requester.
o Reliable - As services are small in size, it is easier to test and debug them.

Programming on Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure

Amazon Web Services, known as AWS, is a cloud computing platform owned and
operated by Amazon. It offers a variety of services, including compute, storage, delivery,
and other functionality that enables businesses to expand their operations and become
more successful. We can leverage these domains in the form of services, which can be
utilised to construct and deploy different sorts of applications in the cloud platform.
Microsoft Azure is a cloud service platform that was developed by Microsoft. It offers
services in a variety of categories, including compute, storage, database, networking,
developer tools, and other functionality that assists businesses in expanding their
operations and becoming more profitable. Platform as a service (PaaS), software as a
service (SaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are the three broad categories that
Azure services fall under. These services can be utilised by software developers and
software employees to create, deploy, and manage services and applications that are
hosted in the cloud.

What is Azure?

Microsoft Azure is a cloud service platform developed by Microsoft that caters to a

variety of departments within an organization, including cloud computation, storage,
database management, networking solutions, and developer tools, among other
features, to assist an organization in becoming more scalable and expansive in its reach
and performance.

Platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and infrastructure as a service

are the three distinct types of services that are offered by Microsoft Azure (IaaS). With
the help of these three services, developers may now build, manage, and administer
services and applications that are hosted in the cloud.

With more than a billion dollars invested in research and development and superb
security specialists on standby to protect your data, Azure is the cloud provider you can
put your faith in. You may secure your data and ease compliance with the help of any
cloud service provider that offers the most comprehensive compliance coverage
available. Azure is the industry leader thanks to its more than 90 compliance services.

Microsoft Azure was first made available to the public in 2010, and it has since grown to
become one of the most successful commercial cloud service providers. It provides a
wide variety of cloud services and functionalities that are seamlessly linked with your
environment, such as analytics, computing, networking, database, storage, mobile, and
web applications, so that you can achieve efficiency and scalability.

Following are the advantages of using Azure −

 Improved scalability
 Business sustainability
 Higher availability and redundancy
 Cost-effective platform
 Hybrid capabilities
 Security and disaster recovery

Following are some of drawbacks of Azure −

  Requires management
 Requires expertise
 Improved scalability

What is AWS?

AWS was first introduced in 2006, and since then it has grown to become the leading
cloud platform among those that are currently available. Cloud platforms provide a
number of benefits, including a reduction in management overhead and a minimization
of associated costs, amongst others.

Amazon Web Services, sometimes known as AWS, is a platform for cloud computing that
was developed and is managed by Amazon. There are over 200 services that are
available from data centers located all over the world, making it the most complete and
commonly utilized cloud platform in the world. AWS is utilized by millions of customers,
including some of the most successful startups, the largest enterprises, and the most
influential government organizations, in order to cut costs, enhance agility, and speed up
innovation.

The three primary categories of Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings are known as
Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Software as a Service
(SaaS).

AWS offers more services and features than any other cloud provider, ranging from
traditional infrastructure technologies such as computation, storage, and databases to
emerging technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, data lakes,
and analytics, etc. AWS is the cloud provider that offers the most services and features
overall. Because of this, migrating your existing apps to the cloud and constructing
virtually anything you can think can be accomplished in a more timely, simple, and
costefficient manner.

Following are the benefits of using AWS −

 Innovation
 Easy to use
 Cost-effective
 Security
 Scalability and flexibility

Following are some drawbacks of using AWS −

 Limitation on resources
 Limitations on security
 Cloud computing issues
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Comparison between Azure and AWS

The following table highlights the important differences between Azure and AWS −

Basis of
AWS Azure
Comparison

We have access to
computers that can
handle the
computation,
processing, and
analysis of data, and
When it comes to
depending on the
computing, Azure
needs of our business,
makes use of virtual
we are able to scale
machines, and when it
up to thousands of
comes to scaling to a
processing nodes with
large extent, it makes
the assistance of cloud
use of virtual machine
service providers.
scale sets.

Compute AWS Elastic Compute

Additionally, for
Cloud (EC2) is the
software
principal solution that
management, Azure
is utilized for scalable
makes use of
computing.
Container Service
(AKS), and it makes
Additionally, the ECS
use of Container
(EC2 Container
Registry for Docker
service) and the EC2
container registry.
container registry are
utilized by AWS in
order to manage
software containers
that are managed by
Docker or Kubernetes.

Storage Cloud providers Azure stores data

typically offer storage using something
in addition to their called a Storage Block
primary service. The blob, which is made
Simple Storage up of individual blocks
Service, which Amazon and allows for the
Web Services (AWS) quick uploading of big
employs, has been blobs. For the purpose
 Basis of
AWS Azure
Comparison

around longer than

Microsoft Azure and
offers a great deal of
of data archiving, it
documentation and
makes use of Storage
training. It provides
cool and Storage
archival storage
archive.
through Glacier, data
archive, and S3 access
on an infrequent basis.

Cloud service
providers typically
have a wide variety of When it comes to
partners and networks networking or content
at their disposal, all of delivery, Azure uses a
which can link to data virtual network, and
centers via a variety of when it comes to
different products. A connecting multiple
virtual private cloud is premises, it uses a
Networking used by AWS for VPN gateway. It does
networking, and an API this with the help of
gateway is used for an application
connecting many on- gateway and load
premises locations balancer so that it can
together. Elastic load evenly distribute the
balancing is used by load during content
AWS to maintain load delivery.
balance while the
network is active.

Deploying Elastic Beanstalk, The ease with which

Apps Batch, Lambda, and an application can be
the AWS container deployed is one of the
service are all many benefits
examples of similar associated with using
technologies that may cloud providers. Using
be found on AWS. On the characteristics of
the other hand, there the PaaS, we would
aren't many like to deploy our
capabilities available application in a
for app hosting. virtually distributed
manner over
numerous servers.
Azure provides a
variety of tools for the
deployment of
 Basis of
AWS Azure
Comparison

applications, including
cloud services, a
container service,
functions, batch, app
services, and so on.

Nearly all cloud

providers offer
customers the
capacity to implement Azure makes use of
a database using the relational
either SQL or database systems
NoSQLbased solutions. SQL database, MySQL,
RDS is Amazon Web and PostgreSQL.
Database Services' Additionally, Azure
implementation of a makes use of Cosmos
relational database as DB for NoSQL
a service, while solutions and Redis
Dynamo DB and Cache for caching
Elastic Cache are its purposes.
solutions for NoSQL
and caching
respectively.

 S3
 Buckets
 EBS  Blob Storage
 SDB  Containers
Storage
 domains  Azure Drive
services
 Easy to use  Table Storage
 SQS  Tables
 CloudFront  Storage Stats
 AWS
Import/Export

Open- AWS is a fantastic Azure offers the

Source platform for open- capability for
Developers source software enterprise customers
developers since it to leverage their
supports Linux users existing active
and provides multiple directory accounts in
integrations for a wide order to sign on to the
variety of open-source Azure cloud platform.
software programs. Additionally, .net
 Basis of
AWS Azure
Comparison

framework may be
run on Windows,
Linux, and MacOS
operating systems.

Conclusion

Although AWS and Azure are very similar in many ways, there are several key
distinctions between the two. Putting these two operating systems head-to-head in
competition with one another would, in all candor, be an unfair comparison. After all, the
requirements of your business should guide your decision on the cloud platform to use.
Users of each of these systems will face their own unique challenges and benefits due to
the inherent differences between them. And either of these two choices will be to the
benefit of both your business and your reputation online.