cloud computing at work

6.1 cloud trends in supporting ubiquitous computing

Pervasive computing, also called ubiquitous computing, is the growing trend of
embedding computational capability (generally in the form of microprocessors)
into everyday objects to make them effectively communicate and perform useful
tasks in a way that minimizes the end user's need to interact with computers
Ubiquitous computing is defined to be a model of computer interaction in
which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday
objects and activity.
It plays as a fundamental technology for ubiquitous M2M/IoT which provides
various integrated services for the Cloud computing
Ubiquitous connectivity means that the connection from anywhere to
anywhere else is secure – unhackably secure. Unhackably secure in this context
means that security (privacy and authenticity of the message) is ensured by
default, through a VPN or similar means.
• the application of ubiquitous computing in different knowledge areas has
increasingly been studied, covering areas such as health (u-health), accessibility
(u-accessibility), learning (u-learning), commerce (u-commerce) and games (u-
games).
• The underlying technologies to support ubiquitous computing include Internet,
advanced middleware, operating system, mobile code, sensors, microprocessors,
new I/O (input / output), new user interfaces, networks, mobile protocols,
location and positioning, new materials,
• 6.2 cloud platforms:
• Amazon EC 2:
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure,
resizable compute capacity in the cloud.
• It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. Amazon
EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with
minimal friction.
• It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run
on Amazon’s proven computing environment.
• Amazon EC2 offers the broadest and deepest compute platform with choice of
processor, storage, networking, operating system, and purchase model.
• We offer the fastest processors in the cloud and we are the only cloud with 400 Gbps
Ethernet networking.
• We have the most powerful GPU instances for machine learning training and graphics
workloads, as well as the lowest cost-per-inference instances in the cloud. More SAP,
HPC, Machine Learning, and Windows workloads run on AWS than any other cloud.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that
offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
• Customers of all sizes and industries can use Amazon S3 to store and protect any
amount of data for a range of use cases, such as data lakes, websites, mobile
applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices,
and big data analytics.
• Amazon S3 provides management features so that you can optimize, organize,
and configure access to your data to meet your specific business, organizational,
and compliance requirements.
• Amazon S3 offers a range of storage classes designed for different use cases.
• Amazon S3 has storage management features that you can use to manage costs,
meet regulatory requirements, reduce latency, and save multiple distinct copies
of your data for compliance requirements.
• Amazon S3 provides features for auditing and managing access to your buckets
and objects.
• To transform data and trigger workflows to automate a variety of other
processing activities at scale.
• Amazon S3 provides logging and monitoring tools that you can use to monitor
and control how your Amazon S3 resources are being used. 
• Amazon S3 offers features to help you gain visibility into your storage usage,
which empowers you to better understand, analyze, and optimize your storage at
scale.
• Amazon S3 provides strong read-after-write consistency for PUT and DELETE
requests of objects in your Amazon S3 bucket in all AWS Regions.
• Amazon S3 is an object storage service that stores data as objects within
buckets.
• An object is a file and any metadata that describes the file. A bucket is a
container for objects.
• Microsoft Azure
• formerly known as Windows Azure, is Microsoft's public cloud
computing platform.
• It provides a range of cloud services, including compute, analytics, storage and
networking.
• Users can pick and choose from these services to develop and scale new
applications, or run existing applications in the public cloud.
• The Azure platform aims to help businesses manage challenges and meet their
organizational goals.
• It offers tools that support all industries -- including e-commerce, finance.
• Once customers subscribe to Azure, they have access to all the services included
in the Azure portal.
• Subscribers can use these services to create cloud-based resources, such as
virtual machines (VM) and databases.
• cloud stack:
• Apache Cloud Stack is an open source infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform
that allows IT service providers.
• Cloud Stack uses existing hypervisors to facilitate cloud handling. Products like
Cloud Stack are known as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions that
deliver a certain infrastructure or method as a hosted service.
• Cloud Stack helps developers create multi-tenant, versatile cloud services and
scale cloud projects.
• CloudStack was once owned by Cloud.com, which released most of the program
as freeware. Later, CloudStack was acquired by Citrix.
• Beyond standard infrastructure-as-a-service functionality, additional
components provide fault management and service management amongst other
services to ensure high availability of user applications.
• inter cloud:
• Intercloud is a network of clouds that are linked with each other. This includes
private, public, and hybrid clouds that come together to provide a seamless
exchange of data.
• The concept of Intercloud was introduced as a research project in 2008 at Cisco,
which was later developed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers (IEEE).
• The Intercloud platform provides end-to-end private connectivity for cloud
applications, enabling customers to address the problem while ensuring security,
the privacy of their data at any point-of-time. 
• Most Intercloud platforms provide the ‘pay-per-use’ service flexibility, giving
clients the opportunity to manage costs effectively, according to the cloud
consumption.
• Other added advantage is its portability: Migration of data could become as
simple as “dragging and dropping” from one provider to the next.
• Google App Engine :
• (often referred to as GAE or simply App Engine) is a cloud computing platform as a
service for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers.
• Applications are sandboxed and run across multiple servers.
• App Engine offers automatic scaling for web applications—as the number of
requests increases for an application, App Engine automatically allocates more
resources for the web application to handle the additional demand.
• The service is free up to a certain level of consumed resources and only in standard
environment but not in flexible environment. 
• App Engine is designed in such a way that it can sustain multiple datacenter outages
without any downtime.
• Google App Engine is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) product that provides Web app
developers and enterprises with access to Google's scalable hosting and tier 1
Internet service.
• The App Engine requires that apps be written in Java or Python, store data in Google
BigTable and use the Google query language.
• cloud open source eucalyptus:
• Eucalyptus is open source software for building AWS-compatible private and
hybrid clouds.
As an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) product, Eucalyptus allows your users
to provision your compute and storage resources on-demand.
• Eucalyptus in cloud computing pools together existing virtualized framework to
make cloud resources for storage as a service, network as a service and
infrastructure as a service.
• Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful
Systems is short known as Eucalyptus in cloud computing.
• Eucalyptus CLIs can oversee both Amazon Web Services and their own private
occasions.
• Clients can undoubtedly relocate cases from Eucalyptus to Amazon Elastic
Cloud. Network, storage, and compute are overseen by the virtualization layer
• Eucalyptus enables pooling compute, storage, and network resources that can be
dynamically scaled up or down as application workloads change.
• open stack:
• OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed
as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual
servers and other resources are made available to users.
• The software platform consists of interrelated components that control diverse, multi-
vendor hardware pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout
a data center.
• Users manage it either through a web-based dashboard, through command-line tools,
or through RESTful web services.
•  In short, OpenStack allows the automatic deployment and management of a cloud
architecture, and it can easily be integrated with other software.
• OpenStack lets users deploy virtual machines and other instances that handle different
tasks for managing a cloud environment.
• OpenStack is open source software, which means that anyone who chooses to can
access the source code, make any changes or modifications they need, and freely share
these changes back out to the community at large
• open nebula:
• OpenNebula is a cloud computing platform for managing heterogeneous
distributed data center infrastructures.
• The OpenNebula platform manages a data center's virtual infrastructure to build
private, public and hybrid implementations of Infrastructure as a Service.
• The two primary uses of the OpenNebula platform are data center virtualization
and cloud deployments based on the KVM hypervisor.
• the platform is also capable of offering the cloud infrastructure necessary to
operate a cloud on top of existing VMware infrastructure.
• the Cloud & Edge Computing Platform that brings flexibility, scalability,
simplicity, and vendor independence to support the growing needs of your
developers and DevOps practices.
• 6.3 future of cloud based smart devices:
• First there was computer, then came smartphone and now there are many devices
that people use as computing platforms.
• Tablets, TVs, eBook readers are things of the past. Now there are Google Glass,
Samsung Watch, Smart TV and many more.
• The list of devices with processor for computations that can be connected to
Internet are increasing every day.
• Businesses are opting to use smart devices to increase quality output.
• Fast training for employees: It takes a lot of training to operate a laser cutter.
This can be taught more efficiently by overlaying visual aids onto the machine,
enabling employees to learn how to use the equipment faster than conventional
tutorials.
• Museum Tours: Audio recordings used currently will be enhanced with visual
components. It’d be great to look at any painting hanging at the Met, have a
software to recognize it and retrieve additional information on demand by a
• the main reason that the future of cloud computing will be as powerful and
expansive as it portends to be is that cloud technology is extremely beneficial.
For one thing, the extreme agility and accessibility of a cloud is far superior to
the use of current technology.
• Faster time to market for software:
• Running your company software via the cloud makes it easier to integrate new
applications and offer additional services.
• You can also call on our IT experts to assist you in rolling out your IT project or
developing your application so you can wrap things up a lot faster.
• Fast innovation and flexible growth
• One of the major concerns shared by IT managers and business managers is
assessing how best to develop their IT infrastructure to suit the needs of the
company. Decisions to innovate are often postponed because of the price tag or
lack of resources. As a result, your company starts to lag behind the competition
and your IT infrastructure slows things down, which has disastrous
consequences for your customer service.
• Avoid productivity loss
• Postponing innovation creates a host of problems: the loss of productivity and
lack of efficiency will eventually cost you a great deal of money.
• The cloud is ideally suited to meet this challenge.
• you will automatically keep up with the most recent technology and your IT
infrastructure will grow along with your business in a flexible way.
• 6.4 Applications:
• Cloud service providers provide various applications in the field of art, business,
data storage and backup services, education, entertainment, management, social
networking, etc.
• Art Applications
• Cloud computing offers various art applications for quickly and easily
design attractive cards, booklets, and images.
• Business Applications
• Business applications are based on cloud service providers. Today, every
organization requires the cloud business application to grow their business. It
also ensures that business applications are 24*7 available to users.
•  Salesforce
• Salesforce platform provides tools for sales, service, marketing, e-commerce,
and more. It also provides a cloud development platform.
• Data Storage and Backup Applications
• Cloud computing allows us to store information (data, files, images, audios, and
videos) on the cloud and access this information using an internet connection.
• As the cloud provider is responsible for providing security, so they offer various
backup recovery application for retrieving the lost data.
• Education Applications
• Cloud computing in the education sector becomes very popular. It offers various online
distance learning platforms and student information portals to the students. 
• Entertainment Applications
• Entertainment industries use a multi-cloud strategy to interact with the target
audience. Cloud computing offers various entertainment applications such as online
games and video conferencing.
Online games
• Today, cloud gaming becomes one of the most important entertainment media. It offers
various online games that run remotely from the cloud. The best cloud gaming services
are Shaow, GeForce Now, Vortex, Project xCloud, and PlayStation Now.
•  Management Applications
• Cloud computing offers various cloud management tools which help admins to
manage all types of cloud activities, such as resource deployment, data
integration, and disaster recovery.
• These management tools also provide administrative control over the platforms,
applications, and infrastructure.
Social Applications
• Social cloud applications allow a large number of users to connect with each
other using social networking applications such as Facebook, Twitter,
Linkedln, etc.
• Facebook
• Facebook is a social networking website which allows active users to share
files, photos, videos, status, more to their friends, relatives, and business
partners using the cloud storage system. On Facebook, we will always get
notifications when our friends like and comment on the posts.
• Home based cloud computing:
• it means that you have access to computing resources like your personal data
and applications from anywhere.
• Cloud computing provides scalable computing power, storage space and
applications, for developing, maintaining, running home services, and accessing
home devices anywhere at anytime.
• Home users can benefit from many aspects of cloud computing services.
• While many cloud vendors and providers target a great deal of their services to
business clients, individual users can also find very attractive cloud packages for
personal communications and other needs.
• Many personal cloud packages can be bought quickly and easily with a credit
card, the same way that you would buy anything online.
• Users may have to fill out personal profiles or surveys related to the service,
which can take some time.
• Energy aware cloud computing:
• Cloud computing is achieved by establishing distributed data centers that
consume a significant volume of energy.
• the envisioned market structure for energy-aware cloud computing that
incorporates energy management strategies at multiple physical layers.
• Providing dynamic computing resources in the cloud computing paradigm
enables corporations to scale up/down the provided services, considering their
clients’ demand and the cost of the leveraged resources that contribute to the
operational cost of the information technology (IT) facilities.
• The scalability of the cloud services enables smaller businesses to benefit from
different categories of expensive computing-intensive services that were once
exclusively available to large enterprises.
• Energy efficiency is increasingly most important for information and
communication technologies
• The reasons are the increased use in advanced technologies, increased energy costs
and the need to reduce GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions.
• These reasons called for energy-efficient technologies that tend to decrease the
overall energy consumption in terms of computation, communications and storage.
• Cloud Computing has been recently attracted as a promising approach for
delivering these advanced technology services by utilizing the data center
resources.
•  Virtual machine (VM) migration has recently emerged technique used as an
essential building block for data center and storage systems, mainly due to its
service provisioning and energy aware consolidation.
• We analyzed the existing energy consumption model for various types of services
in cloud computing environment and we present a new energy-aware provisioning
approach by considering energy efficiency as a key factor.
• Our design encompasses the component called as trigger engine which initiates
automatic migration of VM to preserve the computing environment green and
energy friendly.
• 6.5 Migrating to the cloud:
• Cloud migration is the process of moving digital assets — like data,
workloads, IT resources, or applications — to cloud infrastructure.
• Cloud migration commonly refers to moving tools and data from old, legacy
infrastructure or an on-premises data center to the cloud.
• Step-by-Step Cloud Migration Process
• Define business purpose for migration.
• Evaluate your migration costs and needs.
• Assess the environment and applications.
• Choose cloud environment (single or multi-cloud)
• Determine deployment model (IaaS, PaaS & SaaS)
• Choose a strong cloud partner.
• Choose the right architecture.
• A cloud migration is when a company moves some or all of its data center
capabilities into the cloud, usually to run on the cloud-based infrastructure
provided by a cloud service provider such as AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure.
• As more and more companies have already transitioned to the cloud, cloud
migrations are increasingly taking place within the cloud, as companies migrate
between different cloud providers (known as cloud-to-cloud migration).
• Digital experience - users can access cloud services and data from anywhere,
whether they are employees or customers.
• This contributes to digital transformation, enables an improved experience for
customers, and provides employees with modern, flexible tools.
• Performance - migrating to the cloud can improve performance and end-user
experience.
• Applications and websites hosted in the cloud can easily scale to serve more
users or higher throughput, and can run in geographical locations near to end-
users, to reduce network latency.
• which application do you need?
• Cloud-based application tasks may encompass email, file storage and sharing,
order entry, inventory management, word processing, customer relationship
management (CRM), data collection, or financial accounting features.
• Gradual adoption. Refactoring legacy, on-premises applications to a cloud
architecture in steps allows components to be implemented on a gradual basis.
• A CRM application accessed through a browser under a fee-based software as a
service (SaaS) arrangement is a web application.
• Online banking and daily crossword puzzles are also considered web
applications that don't install software locally.
• sending your existing data to cloud:
• Storage Transfer Service
• This service enables you to quickly import online data into Cloud Storage from
other clouds, from on-premises sources, or from one bucket to another within
Google Cloud.
• You can set up recurring transfer jobs to save time and resources and it can scale
to 10’s of Gbps.
• To automate creation and management of transfer jobs you can use the storage
transfer API or client libraries in the language of your choice.
• Storage Transfer Service is a managed solution which handles retries and
provides detailed transfer logging.
• The data transfer is fast since the data moves over high bandwidth network
pipes.
• The on premise transfer service minimizes the transfer time by utilizing the
maximum available bandwidth and by applying performance optimizations. 
• Transfer Appliance—This is a great option if you want to migrate a large
dataset and don’t have lots of bandwidth to spare.
• Transfer Appliance enables seamless, secure, and speedy data transfer to Google
Cloud.
• For example, a 1 PB data transfer can be completed in just over 40 days using
the Transfer Appliance, as compared the three years it would take to complete an
online data transfer over a typical network (100 Mbps)
• Big Query Data Transfer Service—With this option your analytics team can
lay the foundation for a Big Query data warehouse without writing a single line
of code.
• It automates data movement into BigQuery on a scheduled, managed basis.
• It supports several third-party sources along with transfers from Google SaaS
apps, external cloud storage providers and data warehouses such as Teradata and
Amazon Redshift. 
• cost saving in cloud:
• According to Tech Republic a major driving factor for cloud adoption among IT
professionals has been cost savings.
• One survey showed that nearly 95% of respondents said use of the cloud would
reduce both setup and maintenance costs, and nearly 50% stated that their IT costs
could drop up to 50% by implementing cloud apps and infrastructure.
• Hardware
With cloud computing, hardware needs are the responsibility of the vendor, and you
won't need expensive in-house equipment.
• If your company is growing rapidly, a constant need to invest in new hardware can be an
inconvenient expense. Switching to cloud computing can alleviate these issues and
resources can be acquired swiftly and scaled on demand, giving you freedom and
flexibility you can't achieve on premise.
• Repairing and replacing equipment is also the responsibility of the vendor. This shifts
budget from capital expenditure to operational expenditure.
• It also reduces costs by eliminating the need for an in-house data center, which can take
up valuable office space, and also produces a large amount of heat which must be cooled.
• Maintenance
Labor and maintenance costs can also be reduced by using cloud solutions.
Since hardware is vendor supplied and your data is stored offsite, you don't need
a large contingent of in-house IT staff.
• When servers and other hardware require upgrades or repairs, these tasks fall to
the vendors, freeing up your staff.
• Adoption
Cloud solutions are also extremely easy and intuitive, cutting training time for
employees and speeding adoption across your company.
• Software as a service applications are typically web browser-based and the
applications can be accessed from anywhere with an Internet connection.
• If you have diversified your workforce, moving to the cloud can make your
employees more efficient wherever they work from.