Cloud computing final report seminar-

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 “Cloud Computing”
SEMINAR REPORT
Submitted

In partial fulfillment

For the award of the degree of

Master of Technology

In Department of Computer Science & Engineering

Guided By Submitted by

Mr.Irfan Khan Khushboo Kumari

Assistant Professor Roll No.-22ESFCS603

Department of Computer Science & Engineering Shekhawati Institute of

Engineering & Technology, Sikar

Bikaner Technical University, Bikaner May 2024

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 Candidate’s Declaration

I hereby declare that the work, which is being presented in the Industrial Training/ Seminar,
entitled “Cloud computing” in partial fulfillment for the award of degree of “ Master of
Technology” in Department of Computer Science & Engineering with Specialization in Computer
Science and submitted to the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Shekhawati
Institute of Engineering and Technology, Sikar, Rajasthan Technical University is a record of
my own investigations under the Guidance of Mr. Irfan Khan, Assistant Professor in Computer
Science & Engineering Shekhawati Institute of Engineering and Technology, Sikar

I have not submitted the matter presented in this Industrial Training/ Seminar anywhere for the
award of any other Degree.

Khushboo Kumari
M.Tech. (CSE)

Roll No.: 22ESFCS603

Counter Signed by
Guided By

Mr. Irfan Khan

Assistant Professor
(Department of Computer Science & Engineering)
Shekhawati Institute of Engineering and Technology, Sikar

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 CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that this Industrial Training/ Seminar entitled “Industrial Training/ Seminar
Name” has been successfully carried out by Student Khushboo Kumari, Roll No. 22ESFCS603.
under my supervision and guidance, in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the award of
Master of Technology Degree in Computer Science from Shekhawati Institute of Engineering and
Technology, Sikar.

Guided By
Mr. Irfan Khan
Assistant Professor
(Department of Computer Science & Engineering)
Shekhawati Institute of Engineering and Technology, Sikar

Place:
Date:

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I wish to express my deep sense of gratitude towards my guide Mr.Irfan Khan Assistant
Professor, Computer Science & Engineering), Shekhawati Institute of Engineering and Technology,
Sikar for her guidance and encouraging support which were invaluable for the completion of this
work.

Words are inadequate in offering my thanks to the Dr. K. K. Vyas (Principal), Shekhawati
Institute of Engineering and Technology, Sikar (Raj.) for their encouragement and cooperation in
carrying out the dissertation work.

I take immense pleasure in thanking all the faculty members, staff members and colleagues for
their valuable assistance in the dissertation work.

Khushboo Kumari

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 Contents
1 Introduction 4

2 Cloud Computing Basics 6

2.1 Types of Cloud...........................................................................................................6
2.2 Cloud Stakeholders.....................................................................................................6
2.3 Advantages of using Cloud........................................................................................7

3 Motivation towards Cloud in recent time 8

4 Cloud Architecture 9
4.1 Comparison between Cloud Computing and Grid Computing.................................10
4.2 Relation between Cloud Computing and Utility Computing...................................10
4.3 Types of utility cloud services..................................................................................10

5 Popular Cloud Applications: A Case study 14

5.1 Amazon EC2 and S3 Services..................................................................................14
5.2 Google App-Engine..................................................................................................15
5.3 Windows Azure........................................................................................................16

6 Cloud Computing Application in Indian context 19

6.1 E-Governance...........................................................................................................19
6.2 Rural development....................................................................................................22

7 Conclusion 25

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 1 Introduction

Cloud computing is a recently developing paradigm of distributed computing. Though it is not

a new idea that emerged just recently. In 1969 [16] L. Kleinrock anticipated, “As of now,
computer networks are still in their infancy. But as they grow up and become more sophisticated,
we will probably see the spread of ’computer utilities’ which, like present electric and telephone
utilities, will service individual homes and offices across the country.” His vision was the true
indication of today’s utility based computing paradigm. One of the giant steps towards this world
was taken in mid 1990s when grid computing was first coined to allow consumers to obtain
computing power on demand. The origin of cloud computing can be seen as an evolution of grid
computing technologies. The term Cloud computing was given prominence first by Google’s CEO
Eric Schmidt in late 2006 (maybe he coined the term) [6]. So the birth of cloud computing is very
recent phenomena although its root belongs to some old ideas with new business, technical and
social perspectives. From the archi- tectural point of view cloud is naturally build on an existing
grid based architecture and uses the grid services and adds some technologies like virtualization
and some business models.
In brief cloud is essentially a bunch of commodity computers networked to- gather in same or
different geographical locations, operating together to serve a number of customers with different
need and workload on demand basis with the help of virtualization. Cloud services are provided
to the cloud users as utility ser- vices like water, electricity, telephone using pay-as-you-use
business model. These utility services are generally described as XaaS (X as a Service) where X
can be Software or Platform or Infrastructure etc. Cloud users use these services provided by the
cloud providers and build their applications in the internet and thus deliver them to their end
users. So the cloud users don’t have to worry about installing, maintaining hardware and
software needed. And they also can afford these services as they have to pay as much they use.
So the cloud users can reduce their expen- diture and effort in the field of IT using cloud services
instead of establishing IT infrastructure themselves.
Cloud is essentially provided by large distributed data centers. These data centers are often
organized as grid and the cloud is built on top of the grid services. Cloud users are provided with
virtual images of the physical machines in the data centers. This virtualization is one of the key
concept of cloud computing as it essentially builds the abstraction over the physical system.
Many cloud applications are gaining popularity day by day for their availability, reliability,
scalability and utility model. These applications made distributed computing easy as the critical
aspects are handled by the cloud provider itself.
Cloud computing is growing now-a-days in the interest of technical and busi- ness
organizations but this can also be beneficial for solving social issues. In the recent time
E-Governance is being implemented in developing countries to improve efficiency and
effectiveness of governance. This approach can be improved much by using cloud computing
instead of traditional ICT. In India, economy is agriculture based and most of the citizens live in
rural areas. The standard of living, agricul- tural productivity etc can be enhanced by utilizing
cloud computing in a proper way. Both of these applications of cloud computing have

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technological as well as social challenges to overcome.
In this report we would try to clarify some of the ideas – Why is cloud computing a buzzword
today? i.e. what are the benefits the provider and the users get using cloud? Though its idea has
come long back in 1990 but what situation made it indispensable today? How is cloud built?
What differentiates it from similar terms like grid computing and utility computing? What are the
different services are provided by the cloud providers? Though cloud computing now-a-days
talks about business enterprises not the non-profit organizations; how can this new paradigm be
used in the services like e-governance and in social development issues of rural India?

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 2 Cloud Computing Basics

Cloud computing is a paradigm of distributed computing to provide the customers on-demand,

utility based computing services. Cloud users can provide more reli- able, available and updated
services to their clients in turn. Cloud itself consists of physical machines in the data centers of
cloud providers. Virtualization is pro- vided on top of these physical machines. These virtual
machines are provided to the cloud users. Different cloud provider provides cloud services of
different abstraction level. E.g. Amazon EC2 enables the users to handle very low level details
where Google App-Engine provides a development platform for the developers to develop their
applications. So the cloud services are divided into many types like Software as a Service,
Platform as a Service or Infrastructure as a Service. These services are available over the Internet
in the whole world where the cloud acts as the single point of access for serving all customers.
Cloud computing architecture addresses difficulties of large scale data processing.

2.1 Types of Cloud

Cloud can be of three types [20].

1. Private Cloud – This type of cloud is maintained within an organization and used
solely for their internal purpose. So the utility model is not a big term in this scenario. Many
companies are moving towards this setting and experts consider this is the 1st step for an
organization to move into cloud. Security, network bandwidth are not critical issues for private
cloud.
2. Public Cloud – In this type an organization rents cloud services from cloud providers
on-demand basis. Services provided to the users using utility com- puting model.
3. Hybrid Cloud – This type of cloud is composed of multiple internal or exter- nal
cloud. This is the scenario when an organization moves to public cloud computing domain from
its internal private cloud.

2.2 Cloud Stakeholders

To know why cloud computing is used let’s first concentrate on who use it. And then we
would discuss what advantages they get using cloud. There are three types of stakeholders cloud
providers, cloud users and the end users [Figure 1]. Cloud providers provide cloud services to the
cloud users. These cloud services are of the form of utility computing i.e. the cloud users uses
these services pay-as-you-go model. The cloud users develop their product using these services
and deliver the product to the end users.

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 Figure 1: Interconnection between cloud stakeholders
2.3 Advantages of using Cloud
The advantages for using cloud services can be of technical, architectural, business etc [5, 6].

1. Cloud Providers’ point of view

(a) Most of the data centers today are under utilized. They are mostly 15% utilized. These
data centers need spare capacity just to cope with the huge spikes that sometimes get in the server
usage. Large companies having those data centers can easily rent those computing power to other
organizations and get profit out of it and also make the resources needed for running data center
(like power) utilized properly.
(b) Companies having large data centers have already deployed the resources and to
provide cloud services they would need very little investment and the cost would be incremental.
2. Cloud Users’ point of view
(a) Cloud users need not to take care about the hardware and software they use and also
they don’t have to be worried about maintenance. The users are no longer tied to some one
traditional system.
(b) Virtualization technology gives the illusion to the users that they are having all the
resources available.
(c) Cloud users can use the resources on demand basis and pay as much as they use. So
the users can plan well for reducing their usage to minimize their expenditure.
(d) Scalability is one of the major advantages to cloud users. Scalability is provided
dynamically to the users. Users get as much resources as they need. Thus this model perfectly fits
in the management of rare spikes in the demand.

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 3 Motivation towards Cloud in recent time
Cloud computing is not a new idea but it is an evolution of some old paradigm of distributed
computing. The advent of the enthusiasm about cloud computing in recent past is due to some
recent technology trend and business models [5].

High demand of interactive applications – Applications with real time response and with
capability of providing information either by other users or by non- human sensors gaining more
and more popularity today. These are generally attracted to cloud not only because of high
availability but also because these services are generally data intensive and require analyzing
data across different sources.
1. Parallel batch processing – Cloud inherently supports batch-processing and analyzing
tera-bytes of data very efficiently. Programming models like Google’s map-reduce [18] and
Yahoo!’s open source counter part Hadoop can be used to do these hiding operational complexity
of parallel processing of hundreds of cloud computing servers.
2. New trend in business world and scientific community – In recent times the business
enterprises are interested in discovering customers needs, buying pat- terns, supply chains to take
top management decisions. These require analysis of very large amount of online data. This can
be done with the help of cloud very easily. Yahoo! Homepage is a very good example of such
thing. In the homepage they show the hottest news in the country. And according to the users’
interest they change the ads and other sections in the page. Other than these many scientific
experiments need very time consuming data processing jobs like LHC (Large Hadron Collider).
Those can be done by cloud.
3. Extensive desktop application – Some desktop applications like Matlab, Math- ematica
are becoming so compute intensive that a single desktop machine is no longer enough to run
them. So they are developed to be capable of using cloud computing to perform extensive
evaluations.

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 4 Cloud Architecture

The cloud providers actually have the physical data centers to provide virtualized services to
their users through Internet. The cloud providers often provide separa- tion between application
and data. This scenario is shown in the Figure 2. The underlying physical machines are generally
organized in grids and they are usu- ally geographically distributed. Virtualization plays an
important role in the cloud scenario. The data center hosts provide the physical hardware on
which virtual ma- chines resides. User potentially can use any OS supported by the virtual
machines used.

Figure 2: Basic Cloud Computing Architecture

Operating systems are designed for specific hardware and software. It results in the lack of
portability of operating system and software from one machine to another machine which uses
different instruction set architecture. The concept of virtual machine solves this problem by
acting as an interface between the hardware and the operating system called as system VMs [21].
Another category of virtual machine is called process virtual machine which acts as an abstract
layer between the operating system and applications. Virtualization can be very roughly said to
be as software translating the hardware instructions generated by conventional soft- ware to the
understandable format for the physical hardware. Virtualization also includes the mapping of
virtual resources like registers and memory to real hard- ware resources. The underlying platform
in virtualization is generally referred to as host and the software that runs in the VM environment
is called as the guest. The Figure 3 shows very basics of virtualization. Here the virtualization
layer cov- ers the physical hardware. Operating System accesses physical hardware through
virtualization layer. Applications can issue instruction by using OS interface as well as directly
using virtualizing layer interface. This design enables the users to use applications not
compatible with the operating system.
Virtualization enables the migration of the virtual image from one physical machine to another
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and this feature is useful for cloud as by data locality lots of optimization is possible and also this
feature is helpful for taking back up in different locations. This feature also enables the provider
to shut down some of the data center physical machines to reduce power consumption.

Figure 3: Virtualization basic [21]

4.1 Comparison between Cloud Computing and Grid Com-putting

Most of the cloud architectures are built on Grid architecture and utilizes its ser- vice. Grid is
also a form of distributed computing architecture where organizations owning data centers
collaborate with each other to have mutual benefit. Although if apparently seen it seems that
cloud computing is no different from its originator in the first look but there are substantial
difference between them in spite of so many similarities [12]. The relation between Grid and
cloud computing is discussed in Table 1.

4.2 Relation between Cloud Computing and Utility Com-puting

The cloud users enjoy utility computing model for interacting with cloud service providers.
This Utility computing is essentially not same as cloud computing. Utility computing is the
aggregation of computing resources, such as computation and storage, as a metered service
similar to a traditional public utility like electricity, water or telephone network. This service
might be provided by a dedicated computer cluster specifically built for the purpose of being
rented out, or even an under-utilized supercomputer. And cloud is one of such option of
providing utility computing to the users.

4.3 Types of utility cloud services

Utility computing services provided by the cloud provider can be classified by the type of the
services. These services are typically represented as XaaS where we can replace X by
Infrastructure or Platform or Hardware or Software or Desktop or Data etc. There are three main
types of services most widely accepted - Software as a Service, Platform as a Service and
Infrastructure as a Service. These services provide different levels of abstraction and flexibility to
the cloud users. This is shown in the Figure 4.

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Table 1: Comparison between Grid & Cloud computing

Characteristics Grid Computing Cloud Computing

Adopts project oriented busi-

s model. The participating
ties agree to share a cer- tain
Business Model ount of resource with others and Uses Pay-as-you-go model.
n the opportu- nity of using all
er grids’
resources.
Schedules dedicated resources
by a queuing service. Un- til all
Share all resources simultane-
resources are avail- able as
ly to all the users at the same
cified by the LRM (Local
Resource Management e. This allows la- tency intensive
source Manager) the job waits in
queue. Thus interactive and interac- tive applications run
ncy inten- sive applications are vely in cloud.
exe- cuted efficiently in grid.

No virtualization, as the data

centers are handled by the in-
idual organizations of their own.
they generally man- age those For cloud computing one of the
ally physically but not by ential components is
Virtualization ualization. Al- though there are ualization. This is for pro- viding
e efforts being given by some traction and encap- sulation to
m- panies like Nimbus for vir- users of the cloud.
lization to make dynamic
loyment and abstraction
ilable.

Executing tasks may be small

Supports only loosely cou- pled
Application model or large, loosely coupled or
transaction oriented, mostly
htly coupled, compute in- tensive
ractive jobs.
data intensive.
Grids build on the assump-
tion that resources are hetero-
Cloud security is now in its in-
Security model eous and dynamic. Thus security
cy.
ngineered in fun- damental grid
astructure.

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 Figure 4: Cloud Service stack

We’ll now discuss some salient features of some of these models -

1. SaaS (Software as a service) – Delivers a single application through the web browser
to thousands of customers using a multitenant architecture. On the customer side, it means no
upfront investment in servers or software licens- ing; on the provider side, with just one
application to maintain, cost is low compared to conventional hosting. Under SaaS, the software
publisher (seller) runs and maintains all necessary hardware and software. The customer of SaaS
accesses the applications through Internet. For example Salesforce.com with yearly revenues of
over $300M, offers on-demand Customer Relationship Management software solutions. This
application runs on Salesforce.com’s own infrastructure and delivered directly to the users over
the Internet. Salesforce does not sell perpetual licenses but it charges a monthly subscription fee
start- ing at $65/user/month [10]. Google docs is also a very nice example of SaaS where the
users can create, edit, delete and share their documents, spread- sheets or presentations whereas
Google have the responsibility to maintain the software and hardware.
E.g. - Google Apps, Zoho Office.
2. PaaS (Platform as a service) – Delivers development environment as a ser- vice. One
can build his/her own applications that run on the provider’s infras- tructure that support
transactions, uniform authentication, robust scalability and availability. The applications built
using PaaS are offered as SaaS and consumed directly from the end users’ web browsers. This
gives the ability to integrate or consume third-party web-services from other service platforms.
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 E.g. - Google App Engine.
3. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) – IaaS service provides the users of the cloud greater
flexibility to lower level than other services. It gives even CPU clocks with OS level control to
the developers.
E.g. - Amazon EC2 and S3.

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 5 Popular Cloud Applications: A Case study

Applications using cloud computing are gaining popularity day by day for their high
availability, reliability and utility service model. Today many cloud providers are in the IT
market. Of those Google App-Engine, Windows Azure and Amazon EC2, S3 are prominent ones
for their popularity and technical perspective.

5.1 Amazon EC2 and S3 Services

Amazon Elastic Computing (EC2) [13] is one of the biggest organizations to pro- vide
Infrastructure as a Service. They provide the computer architecture with XEN virtual machine.
Amazon EC2 is one of the biggest deployment of XEN architec- ture to date. The clients can
install their suitable operating system on the virtual machine. EC2 uses Simple Storage Service
(S3) for storage of data. Users can hire suitable amount CPU power, storage, and memory
without any upfront commitment. Users can control the entire software stack from kernel
upwards. The architecture has two components one is the EC2 for computing purposes and S3 is
for storage purposes [14].

• Simple Storage Service: S3 can be thought as a globally available distributed hash

table with high-level access control. Data is stored in name/value pairs. Names are like UNIX file
names and the value can be object having size up-to 5 GB with up-to 4K of metadata for each
object. All objects in Amazon’s S3 must fit into the global namespace. This namespace consists
of a “bucket name” and an “object name”. Bucket names are like user names in traditional email
account and provided by Amazon on first come first serve basis. An AWS (Amazon Web
Services) account can have maximum of 100 buckets.
Data to S3 can be sent by SOAP based API or with raw HTTP “PUT” com- mands. Data can
be retrieved using SOAP HTTP or BitTorrent. While using BitTorrent the S3 system operates as
both tracker and the initial seeder. There are also some tools available which enables the users to
view S3 as a remote file system. Upload download rate from and to S3 is not that much exiting.
One developer from Germany reported experiencing 10-100 KBps. This rate can go up-to 1-2
MBps on the higher side depending on the time of the day. Although the speed is not that much
fascinating it is good enough for deliv- ering web objects and for backup purposes although for
doing computation it is not suitable.
Amazon S3 has a very impressive support for privacy, integrity and short term availability.
Long term availability is unknown as this depends on the internal commitment of Amazon data
centers. Data privacy can be obtained by encrypting the data to be stored. But this encryption is
to be done by the user before storing the data in S3. One can use SSL with HTTPS to connect to
S3 for more security but this usage of SSL increases upload/download time also. Data integrity
can be achieved by checking end to end MD5 checking. When an object is stored into S3 then it
returns MD5 of that object. One can easily check it with previously computed hash value to
guarantee data integrity. Short term availability depends upon the Amazon’s connectivity and
load on its server at that instant. Once the data is actually in the S3 then it is Amazon’s

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responsibility to take care of it’s availability. They claim that the data is backed up on multiple
hard drives in multiple data centers but doesn’t guarantee this by any Service Level Agreement.
There is no backup or recovery mechanism if the user accidentally deletes any data.
Amazon has a very impressive scheme of authentication in comparison to other cloud
services. Every AWS account has an Access Key ID and a Secret Key The ID is of 20 characters
and the Key is a 41 character string. When signing HMAC is first computed for the sign request
parameters using that Key. And in the Amazon server that HMAC is again computed and
compared with the value previously computed in the client side. These requests also include
timestamp to prevent replay attacks.
• Elastic Compute Cloud: As the name implies EC2 rents cloud of computers to the
users with flexibility of choosing the configuration of the virtual machine like RAM size, local
disk size, processor speeds etc.
Machines that deliver EC2 services are actually virtual machines running on top of XEN
platform. Users can store a disk image inside S3 and create a virtual machine in EC2 using tools
provided by Amazon. This virtual machine can be easily instantiated using a java program and
can also be monitored. As EC2 is based on XEN it supports any linux distribution as well as
other OSs. Amazon does not promise about reliability of the EC2 computers. Any machine can
crash at any moment and they are not backed up. Although these machine generally don’t crash
according to the experience of the users but it is safe to use S3 to store information which is more
reliable and replicated service. EC2 security model is similar to that of S3. The only difference is
that the commands are signed with an X 509 private key. But this key is downloaded from AWS
account so the security depends fundamentally on the AWS username and password.

5.2 Google App-Engine

Google App-Engine [1] is a platform for developing and deploying web applications in
Google’s architecture. This provides Platform as a Service to the cloud users. In 2008 Google
App-Engine was first released as beta version. Languages supported by Google App-Engine are
python, java and any extension of JVM languages. App- Engine requires developers to use only
languages which are supported by it and this is also applied with APIs and frameworks. Now
Google App-Engine allows storing and retrieving data from a BigTable non-relational database.
AppEngine applications are expected to be request-reply based. Google App- engine provides
automatic scalability, persistent data storage service. Data store features a query engine and
transaction capabilities. These applications are easy to scale as traffic and data storage need to
grow so the cloud user doesn’t have to worry about the spikes in the traffic or data. These
applications are generally suitable for social networking start-ups, event-based websites catering
to seasonal events or institutions (schools, colleges, universities, government agencies) etc [22].

5.3 Windows Azure

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 Windows Azure [9] is an intermediate in the spectrum of flexibility vs programmer
convenience. These systems use .NET libraries to facilitate language independent managed
environment. This service falls under the category of Platform as a Ser- vice. Though it is
actually in between complete application framework like Google App-Engine and hardware
virtual machines like EC2. Azure applications run on machines in Microsoft data centers. By
using this service customers can use it to run applications and store data on internet accessible
machines owned by Microsoft. windows Azure platform provides three fundamental components
- compute com- ponent, storage component and fabric component. Basic components of
Windows Azure are shown in Figure 5.

• The Compute Service: The primary goal of this platform is to support a large number
of simultaneous users. (Microsoft also said that they would use Azure to build their SaaS
applications which motivated many potential users.) To allow applications to scale out Microsoft
uses multiple instances of that appli- cations on virtual machines provided by Hypervisor.
Developers use Windows Azure portal through Web browser, and use Windows live ID to sign
in into his/her hosting account or storage account or both.
Two different types of Azure instance is available: Web role instance and Worker role
instances.
– Web role instance: As the name implies this type of instance can accept HTTP or
HTTPS requests. For this facility Microsoft uses IIS (Internet Information Services) as a web
server inside the VM provided. Developers can build applications using ASP.NET, Windows
Communication Foun- dation (WCF) or any other .NET technology or native codes also like C+
+. PHP or java based technologies also supported in Azure. Azure scales applications by running
multiple instances without any affinity with a particular Web role instance. So it is perfectly
natural for an Azure application to serve multiple requests from a single user by multiple in-
stances. So this requires to write the client state in the Azure storage after each client request.
– Worker role instance: This type of instances are very similar to that of Web role
instances. But unlike the Web role instances these don’t have IIS configured. They can be
configured to run executable of users’ right. Worker role instance is more likely to function like a
background job. Web role instances can be used to accept request from the users and then they
can be processed by Worker role instances in a later point of time. For a compute intensive work
many Worker role instances can run in parallel.
Loging and monitoring of Azure applications is made easy by provision of ap- plication wide
log. a developer can collect performance related information like measure of CPU usage, store
crash dumps in the storage. Azure doesn’t give the developer the freedom to use his/her own VM
image for Windows Azure. The platform maintains its own Windows. Applications in Azure run
only in user mode - no administrative access isn’t allowed here. So Windows Azure can update
the operating system in each VM without any concern of affecting the applications running on it.
This approach separates administrative work from the user domain.

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 Figure 5: Windows Azure component architecture
– The Storage Service: Applications running in Azure uses storage of different types
– Blobs: This is used for storing binary data in a simple hierarchy. Blobs can have
associated metadata with them. A user account can have one or more containers and these
containers have one or more blobs.
– Storage tables: Blobs provide mechanisms for unstructured data but for more
structured purposes tables are more suitable. These tables are nothing like tables in a traditional
database. They are actually stored in a group of entities. These tables can be accessed by using
ADO.NET Data Services. SQL is not preferable for scale out issues.
– Queue : This is not a structure like tables or blobs to store data but these queues are
used to store messages about tasks to be performed by Worker role instance. These tasks are
written by Web role instances on receiving request from clients. A Worker role instance waiting
on that queue can read the message and perform the task it specifies.

All data in the Windows Azure storage is replicated three times for providing fault tolerance.
Azure also keeps backups in geographically distributed data centers. Windows Azure storage can
be accessed by any Windows Azure ap- plication as well as any application hosted at another
cloud platform. All the blobs, tables, queues are named using URIs and can be accessed by
HTTP methods calls.
Some applications have inherent need for relational databases. This is provided in the form of
SQL Azure. This is build on Microsoft SQL Server. This data can be accessed via ADO.NET or
by other Windows data access interfaces.
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 • The Fabric: All Windows Azure application and all of the data stored in Azure
Storage live are physically happen inside some of the data centers handled by Microsoft. In the
data centers the set of machines dedicated to Azure are organized into a fabric. These machines
are managed by fabric controller. These are replicated in five to seven machines. These
controllers are aware of every Windows Azure application running in that fabric and also owns
all the resources like computers, switches, load balancers etc. Controllers monitors, decides
which resources to allocate to new applications looking at the configuration file with the
application. They also monitor the running applications.

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 6 Cloud Computing Application in Indian context

Today most of the studies in cloud computing is related to commercial benefits. But this idea
can also be successfully applied to non-profit organizations and to the social benefit. In the
developing countries like India Cloud computing can bring about a revolution in the field of low
cost computing with greater efficiency, availability and reliability. Recently in these countries
e-governance has started to flourish. Experts envisioned that utility based computing has a great
future in e- governance. Cloud computing can also be applied to the development of rural life in
India by building information hubs to help the concerned people with greater access to required
information and enable them to share their experiences to build new knowledge bases.

6.1 E-Governance
E-Governance is an interface between Government and public or this can be an interface
between two governments or between government and business organiza- tions [7]. Objectives
are generally to improve efficiency and effectiveness to serve public demand and to save costs
for online services. This requires Government to have the will to decentralize the responsibilities
and processes and start to have faith on electronic and internet systems. E-government is a form
of e-business in gover- nance and refers to the processes and structures needed to deliver
electronic services to the public (citizens and businesses), collaborate with business partners and
to conduct electronic transactions within an organizational entity. This E-Governance can be
greatly improved by utility computing [8].
Impact of Technology in E-governance -

• 24/7 Service Model – Systems and services require high availability. Get the citizens
feel that Government is always at their service.
• Need for Content – Web contents should be regularly updated and the infor- mation
provided to the public should be sufficient. Respective departments should be responsible for
providing the information.
• Human Resource – Building these IT skilled resources would need properly trained
personals. This would make government to compete with other private organizations.

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 • Security – Sensitive Government data is to be highly secured. Policies are to be taken
seriously maintained and designed.
• Privacy – Personal data should be given sufficient privacy. It can be a difficult issue if
data is stored across different departments and computer systems.

Recently Government of India have taken initiative and launched several projects to facilitate
people with better mechanism of governance using IT as a tool. They have launched projects like
Gyan Ganga, e-Gram [17] to leverage the strength of connectivity. Gyan Ganga is one of the
initiatives of the Government of Gujrat to ensure wireless Internet connectivity to 18000 villages
in Gujrat. This project is based on corDECT a technology based on Wireless Local Loop (WLL).
Rural citizens are provided with facilities like browsing emails, Internet, land records, rural job
opportunities, status of various government projects, information about local weather, soil and
consult with experts to increase productivity in agriculture, to have answer to their queries about
veterinary and health care. Gyan Ganga comes with other facilities with on-line registration of
various applications, on-line public grievance form, information on Government projects etc.
Another Government of India initiative is E-Gram computerization of local Gram panchayats.
This is also now implemented in the villages of Gujrat. This E- Gram provides the rural people
services like birth and death certification, property assessment, tax-collection, accounts of gram
panchayats etc.
Why traditional systems are not sufficient? For maintaining traditional sys- tems in
e-government there are many more disadvantages.

• Application life cycle management – Applications are generally developed in

evolutionary manner and changes should be consistent across all the depart- ments and up
gradation should be performed when the system is functioning.
• Software licensing – Software should be licensed for each and every depart- ment
terminal. This incurs a large amount of establishment cost.
• Scalability – Traditional centralized systems have inherent weakness towards the
aspect of scalability.
• Security – This is the most crucial aspect for e-governance. Government information
is highly sensitive. So they should be highly secured. For the traditional systems all the systems
across all the departments should have sufficient security.

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 Most of these disadvantages are addressed by cloud computing [2].

• Scalability – Cloud computing by design supports scalability. The data cen- ters have
enough computing and storage capacity to cope up with the spike demand.
• Modifiable – Applications hosted in cloud can be modified internally without too
much concern of the end users. Change in one place would reflect in all the places inherently and
it would be consistent.
• Data logging – This central facility can be very useful for locating any fault in the
system. Logging can also be used for detecting unauthorized usage checking or detecting
compromization.
• Availability – Cloud services are well known for high availability. If any data center
is down for any reason there is hot backup ready to work immediately. Virtual machine
migration is used to great extend in this situation to facilitate load balancing in case of failure of
some systems.
• Reliability – Replication and migration of instances across data centers make the
reliability of the system very high in the cloud scenario.
• Physical disaster recovery – Backup policies can be very useful for physical disaster
avoidance and this is inherent to the cloud system. Data is stored in different physical location so
that hot backup can be provided whenever needed.
• Policy management – Polices can be managed in a centralized fashion. This is helpful
for introducing Government policies readily unlike the present scenario.
• Legacy software – An already developed software can be moved to cloud with minor
changes some times. So the Government doesn’t incur cost for develop- ing applications which it
already has.
• Pay model – Cloud providers’ pay-as-you-use model enables the customer
(Government) to reduce cost of deployment and control the usage.
• Reduce power consumption – Adaptation of cloud reduces power consump- tion in
different offices and usage of power is concentrated in the data center only. But also that is not
the concern of the government as those data centers are to be handled by the third party who
provides cloud services.

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 Though it seems that cloud computing is indispensable for e-government but there are many
issues related to Cloud Computing application -

• Security Concern – Government works are highly security sensitive and the policies
sometimes must not be go into public. But in cloud computing scenario security is not properly
implemented today. So this is a big concern.
• Policy Concern – Government has certain policies but the third party cloud provider
may have contradicting policies.
• Lack of faith in networks – Many government departments don’t have that much trust
in networks and internet. So they would not jump into accepting cloud computing.

6.2 Rural development

In the context of rural development cloud computing can also be used to success for its
centralized storage and computing facility and utility based pay model. As per [3] 72.2% of total
Indian population resides in rural areas. According to the survey conducted by “Hole in the Wall
project” [11] computer literacy among boys and girls of age group 8-14 in rural area varies
across the regions of India. It is 40- 50% in most of the regions. So the computer literacy is not a
concern in rural India and also in [11] it shown that learning rate is pretty high for computer
literacy. Agriculture is India’s biggest employment source, accounting for 52% employment in
India [4]. And agricultural sector contributes to 20% of country’s total GDP. So it is very
important to make a serious attempt to develop rural India.
Rural development can be in the form of education, agriculture, health, cul- ture or in any
other fields. Now a days most of the villages have some access to electricity and cellular phone.
So there is technical feasibility of establishing com- puter systems. But the mentality of the
people haven’t been changed that much and that’s why the spread of personal computer is not
that much significant in the villages. We think this growth rate can be enhanced if the computing
system is really cheap, easy to operate with minimum level of knowledge, without upfront
commitment and more essentially if the system is helpful to enhance their life style. The main
aim of the system is to make the people in rural areas to have access to recent technology and
with the help of the computing system enhance their standard of living and also this would lead
to a grater good of developing the nation.
Why not traditional web services?
• Availability – Many of the services should be available always like health etc. These
availability issues are not that well handled by the traditional web services as they are handled
typically by a single server and thus the server downtime is always there to happen.
• The villagers have to own a PC – To use traditional web services through in- ternet
the villagers need to own a PC which would increase their investment. Then the issues of need
for technical experts for software/hardware installa- tion and maintenance are needed. But
naturally
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the number of such experts is very less in number in the remote village. Upgradation of software
or hardware would be a problem both economically and technically.

With the help of cloud computing this can be made possible. We’ll now discuss the
technological and economic advantages for using cloud.

• No upfront commitment – The villagers need not to invest too much to buy computing
system and commit. But instead they can have very low cost terminals with basic functionality of
I/O and have a network access.
• No maintenance issues – The users need not to be an expert for maintenance. This
solves the unavailability of technical experts in the remote villages as the maintenance issues are
handled by the cloud provider explicitly.
• Upgraded version of hardware and software – The users always use the up- graded
version of software and hardware as maintained by the cloud provider. This reduces the cost of
up gradation.
• On-demand resource allocation – The virtual resources can be extended as needed. If
the user needs more resource then it is provided on demand basis.
• Utility computing model – The economic model used by the cloud is pay-as- you-use.
This enables the users handle the cost they have to pay.

By using cloud computing model some improvement of the current system is possible to bring
about social and as well as economic prospect in rural India.

• Share knowledge and build knowledge base – Most of the agriculture related issues
are generally local and they can’t be solved by general expertise. So it happens many times that
the so called experts are not the right person to answer the problems but instead the local farmers
are better in understanding.
So in these situations better solution can be given by the local experts. If these local experts
access a common space to share their knowledge then others eventually come to know about the
solution. Thus a knowledge base can be build which would represent the issues in that local
scenario. It is like building Wikipedia.
• Health and medical services – In the developing countries like India one of the
concern of Rural health care is in spite of best intention from both the medical professionals and
patients a practical challenge is faced for difficulties of communications among interested parties
[15]. This issue can be solved using cloud computing in an appropriate way. Consultation among
doctors around the world make sharing of knowledge possible and takes telemedicince to the
next level, creating a network that goes beyond the one-to-one, patient- to-patient,
patient-to-doctor or doctor-to-doctor interactions. In this way a patient suffering from a particular
disease can be better treated by consulting with doctors within region and also outside who may
have more experience with such a case.
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 • Education in remote areas – Education in rural areas can be enhanced with the help of
distance education. Education can be provided in different lan- guages and with respect to
different curriculum with the aid of e-learning components. Students can be encouraged to build
their own multimedia pre- sentations. These can be hosted in the cloud. This type of approach
encourage the students to concentrate more on learning and representing the material and also
that would build the knowledge in the cloud for other students to refer. This is possible with the
aid of cloud computing with greater reliability and availability.
• Government decision making – Looking at the common knowledge base the
Government can have a fair knowledge of the local situation and take adoptive steps.
• Access to Information hub – Government can provide relevant information such as
land revenue data, weather data, soil information etc. through these cloud services to the people
concerned.

All these things are possible with right initiative. These may need customiz- ing the original
cloud services. Some generally unpopular services like Desktop as a Service may make sense in
these scenario which essentially tells about providing the users a virtual desktop environment.
But deployment of cloud services in rural areas have some issues associated with it.
• The first and foremost issue for the deployment of internet based services in rural India
is the availability of electricity and networks. Currently there are a number of initiatives
underway to explore alternative to wired Internet, in- cluding WiFi, WiMax, satellite-based
Internet connectivity. Such an effort is made by Midas Communication technologies and Indian
Institute of Madras in the name of corDECT which is a wireless access system. It provides simul-
taneously voice and 35-70kbps Internet access to wireless subscriber. Another effort is [19]
where the authors modified traditional WiFi to make it efficiently work in long distance suitable
in the context of rural area.
• Optimization due to data locality – Store the data where it is mostly used is known as
the data locality. This is very helpful for optimization purpose. This can be done by establishing
data centers in rural India. But the cost of power and bandwidth may not be cheap in many
places. So for those places some efficiency and economic trade off should be obeyed.

India is now world’s 2nd fastest growing economy. As per World Bank survey, by this year
the growth rate of India’s economy would be faster than currently fastest economy China. In
India there is very large scope of applying IT in domestic level and that encouraged the cloud
providers to establish cloud services in India. Today companies like Reliance, TATA, Zenith
Computers, Wipro Technologies, Netmagic Solutions, and Reliance are providing cloud services
in India successfully. These companies can grasp the huge market in the rural India as well as
making social development.

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 7 Conclusion
Cloud computing is a newly developing paradigm of distributed computing. Vir- tualization in
combination with utility computing model can make a difference in the IT industry and as well as
in social perspective. Though cloud computing is still in its infancy but its clearly gaining
momentum. Organizations like Google, Yahoo, Amazon are already providing cloud services.
The products like Google App-Engine, Amazon EC2, Windows Azure are capturing the market
with their ease of use, availability aspects and utility computing model. Users don’t have to be
worried about the hinges of distributed programming as they are taken care of by the cloud
providers. They can devote more on their own domain work rather than these administrative
works. Business organizations are also showing increasing in- terest to indulge themselves into
using cloud services. There are many open research issues in this domain like security aspect in
the cloud, virtual machine migration, dealing with large data for analysis purposes etc. In
developing counties like India cloud computing can be applied in the e-governance and rural
development with great success. Although as we have seen there are some crucial issues to be
solved to successfully deploy cloud computing for these social purposes. But they can be
addressed by detailed study in the subject.

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