The Fundamentals of Cloud Computing

1. Business value:
Flexibility and ability to match the cost of the service to the consumption differentiate
cloud computing from other internet services and though critical, this feature creates a
new value for business services and enables to develop of new business models which
have never been tried till now, as Cloud is not a kind of resource expense which can be
replaced by means of working costs.

2. Service deployment:
The strength of cloud computing is instantaneous output, as customers can get service
within a few minutes only. But, payment has not been done instantly all the way
through the typical manual itself.

3. Self-service deployment:
Spontaneous and well-defined services provided by cloud computing can be utilized
independently by customers.
All these core fundamentals imply a fully automated service provisioning and for the
consumer, it means, “Service is in your hand take or leave it!”

Cloud computing, as a service in the form of “IAAS (Infrastructure as a Service)” and

“PAAS (Platform as a Service)” by means of Infrastructure and Platform, are
evolutionary steps to change its deployment model and the business value in very
thoughtful ways. As cloud computing is a completely new part of the IT portfolio, just
washing up the pre-existing services with a cloud doesn’t make any sense. It’s very
important to focus on the things that make cloud computing, original and distinctive in
every way.

Nowadays as a part of rapid growth, the traditional concept has been replaced by on-
demand service, and that’s why, genuine prospective of SaaS (Software as a Service),
has been not fulfilled in a proper way. As in fact, existing products are simply rebranded
or just repackaged by vendors.

Similarly, to profit from the wave of cloud computing, pre-existing features of cloud
computing have been rebranded without any proper functionality. To do this all, the
concept of Cloud washing is implemented by vendors to convince decision-makers of
any business or IT industry that how his strategy is useful to maintain swiftness with the
latest innovations in the marketplace. Still, due to a few factors that are lacking, the
strategy of cloud washing has not been fully implemented yet.

For all industrial applications based on a Cloud environment, it’s very beneficial to
implement the concept of Cloud scalability. For effective functioning, the cloud needs to
be designed with the provision of everlasting abstract scalability which can be
controlled by service, if included in the architecture of the cloud-based application.
Thus, the service itself manipulates a scalable architecture design of an application, this
is why Cloud-based application essentially requires scalable architecture design.

NOTE: Cloud infrastructure provides an unbounded scalability.

Requirements of a strictly scalable application as follows:
1. Automatic enhancement of resources derived from the demand
2. Operationally competent enough while scaling up and down
3. Safe service
4. Fault-tolerant.

Types of Cloud Hosting Services Models

As a part of business objectives, customer service can be provided by means of Cloud
Service Models. Basically there are three types of Cloud Service Models as follows:

1. SaaS (Software as a Service)

2. PaaS (Platform as a Service)
3. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)
Software as a service (SaaS)
In this type of model, the cloud application is highly controlled by the administrative
authority and the service provider is charged for updates, development, maintenance,
and security. Thus, the service provider controls the final authority over the whole
application and the end-user is totally free from any service issues.

Example of SaaS is Gmail, where Google is the provider and we are just end users.

SaaS Component Stack and Scope of

Control
Despite of organizations and enterprises, an individual can be a subscriber or user of
SaaS.
In most of the cases, calculation of usage fee depends on the number of users.

For example: Google Apps for business, individually charges fees for more than 10
users,
In SAAS, in spite of concentrating on hardware maintenance, infrastructure
management, job hiring and retaining etc, center of attention needs to be the business.
Need of SAAS
In the cloud applications, SAAS can be implemented by means of productivity and
collaboration, to make the task a little bit easier for HR, PayRoll and Sales

Cloud-based storage and sharing services like Dropbox, Windows Live, Amazon S3,
Google Docs, and Box.net, etc.

NOTE: Individual use of more than 30 Google Cloud Services is an example of SAAS
itself.
PaaS (Platform as a Service)
A policy to develop, test and deploy software is practically known as a platform and the
entire SDLC is operated on a service model called PAAS. PaaS is dedicated to
application developers, testers, and administrators. Everything required to build up a
cloud SaaS application is provided by PAAS.
PaaS Component Stack and Scope of
Control
On average, development environment, programming languages, compilers, testing
tools, and deployment mechanisms, etc are included in PaaS.

For example: In Google Apps Engine (GAE), the developer downloads the development
environment, locally in the developer’s infrastructure otherwise accesses tools in the
provider’s infrastructure through a browser.

Independent Software Vendors, IT Service providers, or even individual developers

wishing to develop SAAS, can become subscribers of PaaS.

Need of PAAS
The developer needs to concentrate on just the application development as the
platform itself takes care of everything.

IaaS
A range of virtual computers, cloud storage, network infrastructure components like
firewalls and configuration services, etc, is nothing but IaaS.

The System Administrators are the subscribers of this service and by considering per
hour CPU utilization, storing of data, network bandwidth and infrastructure consumed
respectively, the cost can be added and services can be used.

For example: monitoring, auto-scaling etc.

The fee structure of IAAS depends on all the above-mentioned factors and can be
calculated by considering each of them.
 IaaS Component Stack and Scope of
Control
In the case of a newly established company, IAAS can be very useful in launching any
application or website.

A different way to deliver computer

resources
In the past decade, information technology (IT) has embarked on the cloud computing
paradigm. Although cloud computing is only a different way to deliver computer
resources, rather than a new technology, it has sparked a revolution in the way
organizations provide information and service.

Originally IT was dominated by mainframe computing. This sturdy configuration

eventually gave way to the client-server model. Contemporary IT is increasingly a
function of mobile technology, pervasive or ubiquitous computing, and of course,
cloud computing. But this revolution, like every revolution, contains components of
the past from which it evolved.

Thus, to put cloud computing in the proper context, keep in mind that in the DNA of
cloud computing is essentially the creation of its predecessor systems. In many ways,
this momentous change is a matter of “back to the future” rather than the definitive
end of the past. In the brave new world of cloud computing, there is room for
innovative collaboration of cloud technology and for the proven utility of predecessor
systems, such as the powerful mainframe. This veritable change in how we compute
provides immense opportunities for IT personnel to take the reins of change and use
them to their individual and institutional advantage.

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is a comprehensive solution that delivers IT as a service. It is an
Internet-based computing solution where shared resources are provided like electricity
distributed on the electrical grid. Computers in the cloud are configured to work
together and the various applications use the collective computing power as if they
are running on a single system.

The flexibility of cloud computing is a function of the allocation of resources on

demand. This facilitates the use of the system’s cumulative resources, negating the
need to assign specific hardware to a task. Before cloud computing, websites and
server-based applications were executed on a specific system. With the advent of
cloud computing, resources are used as an aggregated virtual computer. This
amalgamated configuration provides an environment where applications execute
independently without regard for any particular configuration.

Why the rush to the cloud?

There are valid and significant business and IT reasons for the cloud computing
paradigm shift. The fundamentals of outsourcing as a solution apply.

 Reduced cost: Cloud computing can reduce both capital expense (CapEx) and
operating expense (OpEx) costs because resources are only acquired when
needed and are only paid for when used.
 Refined use of personnel: Using cloud computing frees valuable personnel,
allowing them to focus on delivering value rather than maintaining hardware
and software.
 Robust scalability: Cloud computing allows for immediate scaling, either up
or down, at any time without long-term commitment.

Cloud computing building blocks

The cloud computing model is comprised of a front end and a back end. These two
elements are connected through a network, in most cases the Internet. The front end
is the vehicle by which the user interacts with the system; the back end is the cloud
itself. The front end is composed of a client computer, or the computer network of an
enterprise, and the applications used to access the cloud. The back end provides the
applications, computers, servers, and data storage that creates the cloud of services.

Layers: Computing as a commodity

The cloud concept is built on layers, each providing a distinct level of functionality.
This stratification of the cloud’s components has provided a means for the layers of
cloud computing to becoming a commodity just like electricity, telephone service, or
natural gas. The commodity that cloud computing sells is computing power at a lower
cost and expense to the user. Cloud computing is poised to become the next mega-
utility service.
The virtual machine monitor (VMM) provides the means for simultaneous use of
cloud facilities (see Figure 1). VMM is a program on a host system that lets one
computer support multiple, identical execution environments. From the user’s point of
view, the system is a self-contained computer which is isolated from other users. In
reality, every user is being served by the same machine. A virtual machine is one
operating system (OS) that is managed by an underlying control program, allowing it
to appear to be multiple operating systems. In cloud computing, VMM allows users to
monitor and thus manage aspects of the process such as data access, data storage,
encryption, addressing, topology, and workload movement.
Figure 1. How the Virtual Machine Monitor works

These are the layers the cloud provides:

 The infrastructure layer is the foundation of the cloud. It consists of the physical
assets — servers, network devices, storage disks, etc. Infrastructure as a
service (IaaS) includes providers such as the IBM® Cloud. Using IaaS you don’t
actually control the underlying infrastructure, but you do have control of the
operating systems, storage, deployment applications, and, to a limited degree,
control over select networking components.

Print On Demand (POD) services are an example of organizations that can

benefit from IaaS. The POD model is based on the selling of customizable
products. PODs allow individuals to open shops and sell designs on products.
Shopkeepers can upload as many or as few designs as they can create. Many
upload thousands. With cloud storage capabilities, a POD can provide unlimited
storage space.

 The middle layer is the platform. It provides the application infrastructure.

Platform as a service (PaaS) provides access to operating systems and
associated services. It provides a way to deploy applications to the cloud using
programming languages and tools supported by the provider. You do not have
to manage or control the underlying infrastructure, but you do have control
over the deployed applications and, to some degree over application hosting
environment configurations.

PaaS includes providers such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The
small entrepreneur software house is an ideal enterprise for PaaS. With the
elaborated platform, world-class products can be created without the overhead
of in-house production.

 The top layer is the application layer, the layer most visualize as the cloud.
Applications run here and are provided on demand to users. Software as a
service (SaaS) has providers such as Google Pack. Google Pack includes
Internet accessible applications, tools such as Calendar, Gmail, Google Talk,
Docs, and many more.

Figure 2 shows the layers of cloud computing.

Figure 2. Cloud computing layers embedded in the “as a service”
components

Cloud formations
There are three types of cloud formations: private (on premises), public, and hybrid.

 Public clouds are available to the general public or a large industry group and
are owned and provisioned by an organization selling cloud services. A public
cloud is what is thought of as the cloud in the usual sense; that is, resources
dynamically provisioned over the Internet using web applications from an off-
site third-party provider that supplies shared resources and bills on a utility
computing basis.
 Private clouds exist within your company’s firewall and are managed by your
organization. They are cloud services you create and control within your
enterprise. Private clouds offer many of the same benefits as the public clouds
— the major distinction being that your organization is in charge of setting up
and maintaining the cloud.
 Hybrid clouds are a combination of the public and the private cloud using
services that are in both the public and private space. Management
responsibilities are divided between the public cloud provider and the business
itself. Using a hybrid cloud, organizations can determine the objectives and
requirements of the services to be created and obtain them based on the most
suitable alternative.

IT roles in the cloud

Consider the probability that management and administration require greater
automation. The automation requires a change in the tasks of personnel responsible
for scripting due to the growth in code production. In this situation, you can see that IT
might be consolidating, with a need for less hardware and software implementation,
but it is also creats new formations. The shift in IT is toward the knowledge worker. In
this paradigm, the technical human assets have greater responsibilities for enhancing
and upgrading general business processes.

The developer
The growing use of mobile devices, the popularity of social networking, and other
aspects of the evolution of commercial IT processes and systems, guarantee work for
the developer community. However, some of the traditional roles of development
personnel are shifted away from the enterprise’s developers due to the systemic and
systematic processes of the cloud configuration model.

A survey by IBM demonstrates that the demand for mobile technology will grow
exponentially. This development, along with the rapid acceptance of cloud computing
across the globe, necessitates a radical increase of developers with an understanding
of this area. To meet the growing needs of mobile connectivity, more developers are
required who understand how cloud computing works.

Cloud computing provides an almost unlimited capacity, eliminating scalability

concerns. Cloud computing gives developers access to software and hardware assets
that most small and mid-sized enterprises could not afford. Developers, using Internet-
driven cloud computing and the assets that are a consequence of this configuration,
have access to resources that most could have only dreamed of in the recent past.

The administrator
Administrators are the guardians and legislators of an IT system. They are responsible
for the control of user access to the network. This means sitting on top of the creation
of user passwords and the formulation of rules and procedures for such fundamental
functionality as general access to the system assets. The advent of cloud computing
necessitates adjustments to this process, because administrators in such an
environment is no longer merely concerned about internal matters, but also with the
external relationship of their enterprises and the cloud computing concern. They are
also concerned with the actions of other tenants in a public cloud.

This situation alters the role of the firewall constructs that are put in place by the
administration and the nature of the general security procedures of the enterprise. But
it does not negate the need for the guardian of the system. With cloud computing
comes even greater responsibility, not less. With cloud computing, the administrators
must not only ensure data and systems internal to the organization, they must also
monitor and manage the cloud to ensure the safety of their system and data
everywhere.

The architect
The function of the architecture is the effective modeling of the given system’s
functionality in the real IT world. The basic responsibility of the architect developing
the architectural framework of the agency’s cloud computing model. The architecture
of cloud computing is essentially comprised of the abstraction of the three layer
constructs, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, in such a way that the particular enterprise
deploying the cloud computing approach meets its stated goals and objectives. The
abstraction of the functionality of the layers is developed so the decision makers and
the foot soldiers can use the abstraction to plan, execute, and evaluate the efficacy of
the IT system’s procedures and processes.

The role of the architect in the age of cloud computing is to conceive and model a
functional interaction of the cloud’s layers. The architect must use the abstraction as a
means to ensure that IT is playing its proper role in the attainment of organizational
objectives.

To cloud or not to cloud: Risk assessment

The main concerns voiced by those moving to the cloud are security and privacy. The
companies supplying cloud computing services know this and understand that without
reliable security, their businesses will collapse. So security and privacy are high
priorities for all cloud computing entities.

Governance: How will industry standards be monitored?

Governance is the primary responsibility of the owner of a private cloud and the
shared responsibility of the service provider and service consumer in the public cloud.
However, given elements such as transnational terrorism, denial of service, viruses,
worms and the like — which could have aspects beyond the control of either the
private cloud owner, public cloud service provider, and service consumer — there is a
need for some kind of broader collaboration (particularly on the global, regional, and
national levels). Of course, this collaboration must be instituted in a way that doesn’t
dilute or otherwise harm the control of the owner of the process (or the subscribers in
the case of a public cloud).

Bandwidth requirements
If you are going to adopt the cloud framework, your strategy must include evaluating
bandwidth and the potential bandwidth bottleneck. In the CIO.com article: The Skinny
Straw: Cloud Computing’s Bottleneck and How to Address It, the following statement is
made:
Virtualization implementers found that the key bottleneck to virtual machine density is
memory capacity; now there’s a whole new slew of servers coming out with much
larger memory footprints, removing memory as a system bottleneck. Cloud computing
negates that bottleneck by removing the issue of machine density from the equation
— sorting that out becomes the responsibility of the cloud provider, freeing the cloud
user from worrying about it.
For cloud computing, bandwidth to and from the cloud provider is a bottleneck.

So what is the best current solution for the bandwidth issue? At the time of writing this
article, the best answer is the blade server. A blade server is a server that has been
optimized to minimize the use of physical space and energy. One of the huge
advantages of the blade server for cloud computing use is bandwidth speed
improvement. For example, the IBM BladeCenter is designed to accelerate the high-
performance computing workloads both quickly and efficiently. Just as the memory
issue had to be overcome to effectively alleviate the bottleneck of virtual high
machine density, the bottleneck of cloud computing bandwidth must also be
overcome, so look to the capabilities of your provider to determine if the bandwidth
bottleneck is a major performance issue.

Financial impact
Because a sizable proportion of the cost in IT operations comes from administrative
and management functions, the implicit automation of some of these functions cuts
costs per se in a cloud computing environment. Automation can reduce the error
factor and the cost of the redundancy of manual repetition significantly.

There are other contributors to financial problems such as the cost of maintaining
physical facilities, electrical power use, cooling systems, and of course administration
and management factors. As you can see, bandwidth is not alone, by any means.

Mitigate the risk

Consider these possible risks:

 Adverse impact of mishandling of data.

 Unwarranted service charges.
 Financial or legal problems of vendor.
 Vendor operational problems or shutdowns.
 Data recovery and confidentiality problems.
 General security concerns.
 Systems attacks by external forces.

With the use of systems in the cloud, there is the ever present risk of data security,
connectivity, and malicious actions interfering with the computing processes.
However, with a carefully thought out plan and methodology of selecting the service
provider, and an astute perspective on general risk management, most companies can
safely leverage this technology.

In conclusion
In this revolutionary era, cloud computing can provide organizations with the means
and methods needed to ensure financial stability and high quality service. Of course,
there must be global cooperation if the cloud computing process is to attain optimal
security and general operational standards. With cloud computing, it is imperative for
us all to be ready for the revolution.