CS 4037

Introduction to Cloud
Computing
Lecture 3
Danyal Farhat
FAST School of Computing
NUCES Lahore
 Understanding
Cloud Computing
Lecture’s Agenda
• Origins and Influences

• Basic Concepts and Terminologies

• Goals and Benefits

• Risks and Challenges

A Brief History
Computer Scientist John McCarthy proposed in 1961:

“If computers of the kind I have advocated become the

computers of the future, then computing may someday be
organized as a public utility just as the telephone system is a
public utility. The computer utility could become the basis of
a new and important industry.”
A Brief History (Cont.)
In 1969, ARPANET’s chief scientist Leonard Kleinrock stated:

“As of now, computer networks are still in their infancy, but

as they grow up and become sophisticated, we will probably
see the spread of computer utilities.”

ARPANET project seeded the Internet.

A Brief History (Cont.)
• In the late 1990s, Salesforce.com pioneered the notion of
bringing services into the enterprise.
• remotely provisioned
• In 2002, Amazon.com launched the Amazon Web Services
(AWS) platform, a suite of enterprise-oriented services that
provide remotely provisioned storage, computing
resources, and business functionality.
A Brief History (Cont.)
• In 2006, the term “cloud computing” emerged in the
commercial arena when Amazon launched its Elastic
Compute Cloud (EC2) services that enabled organizations
to “lease” computing capacity and processing power to run
their enterprise applications.
• Google Apps also began providing browser-based
enterprise applications in 2006.
• In 2009, the Google App Engine became another historic
milestone in cloud computing.
• In 2008, MS Azure was introduced but officially launched in
the year 2010.
 MX 960 Router

Data Center Components

Rack
Server Front

EX 4200 Switch
Server Back
Definitions
Gartner, Inc. is an American technological research and
consulting firm. As per a Gartner report:

“Cloud computing is a style of computing in which scalable

and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service
to external customers using Internet technologies.”
Definitions (Cont.)
Forrester is another American research and consulting firm.
Forrester Research provided its own definition of cloud
computing as:

“A standardized IT capability (services, software, or

infrastructure) delivered via Internet technologies in a pay-
per-use, self-service way.”
Definitions (Cont.)
The definition that received industry-wide acceptance was
composed by the US National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST).
“Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous,
convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of
configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers,
storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly
provisioned and released with minimal management effort
or service provider interaction. This cloud model is
composed of five essential characteristics, three service
models, and four deployment models.”
Definitions (Cont.)
The book provides a more concise definition:

“Cloud computing is a specialized form of distributed

computing that introduces utilization models for remotely
provisioning scalable and measured resources.”
Activity 1
• What is the processing capacity (in GHz) of an HP Gen 10
server having 48 CPUs and 6 cores per CPU?
Business Drivers – Capacity Planning
• “Capacity planning is the process of determining and fulfilling
future demands of an organization’s IT resources, products, and
services.”
• Represents the maximum amount of work that an IT resource is
capable of delivering in a given period of time.
• Capacity Planning Strategies:
Lead Strategy
 Adding capacity to an IT resource in anticipation of demand
Lag Strategy
 Adding capacity when the IT resource reaches its full capacity
Match Strategy
 Adding IT resource capacity in small increments, as demand increases
 For example, add a new node when workload reaches 60% of the total capacity
Business Drivers – Cost Reduction
• Two costs need to be accounted for:
The cost of acquiring new infrastructure – Capital Expenditure (CAPEX)
The cost of infra’s ongoing ownership – Operational Expenditure (OPEX)
• Common forms of infrastructure-related operating overhead:
Technical personnel required to keep the environment operational
Upgrades and patches that introduce additional testing and deployment
cycles
Utility bills and capital expense investments for power and cooling
Security and access control measures that need to be maintained and
enforced to protect infrastructure resources
Administrative and accounts staff that may be required to keep track of
licenses and support arrangements
• Migration to cloud usually minimize all the operating overheads
Business Drivers – Organization Agility
• “Organizational agility is the measure of an organization’s
responsiveness to change.”

• Businesses need the ability to adapt and evolve to successfully face

change caused by both internal and external factors.

• An IT enterprise often needs to respond to business change by

scaling its IT resources beyond the scope of what was previously
predicted or planned for.
Technology Innovations
Clustering:
• A cluster is a group of independent IT resources that are
interconnected and work as a single system.
• System failure rates are reduced while availability and reliability are
increased, since redundancy and failover features are inherent to
the cluster.
• Component devices that form a cluster are kept in synchronization
through dedicated, high-speed communication links.
• The basic concept of built-in redundancy and failover is core to
cloud platforms.
Technology Innovations (Cont.)
Grid Computing:
• A computing grid provides a platform in which computing resources
are organized into one or more logical pools.
• These pools are collectively coordinated to provide a high
performance distributed grid, sometimes referred to as a ‘super
virtual computer.’
• Grid computing differs from clustering in that grid systems are
much more loosely coupled and distributed.
• Grid computing systems can involve computing resources that are
heterogeneous and geographically dispersed, which is generally not
possible with cluster computing-based systems.
Technology Innovations (Cont.)
Virtualization:
• Virtualization represents a technology platform used for the
creation of virtual instances of IT resources.
• A layer of virtualization software allows physical IT resources to
provide multiple virtual images of themselves so that their
underlying processing capabilities can be shared by multiple users.
• As cloud computing evolved, a generation of modern virtualization
technologies emerged to overcome the performance, reliability,
and scalability limitations of traditional virtualization platforms.
• As a foundation of contemporary cloud technology, modern
virtualization provides a variety of virtualization types and
technology layers.
Origins and Influences – Key Points
• The primary business drivers that exposed the need for cloud
computing and led to its formation include capacity planning, cost
reduction, and organizational agility.

• The primary technology innovations that influenced and inspired

key distinguishing features and aspects of cloud computing include
clustering, grid computing, and traditional forms of virtualization.
Activity 2
• Draw a simple architecture showing both cluster and grid
computing is being used in a single organization having
two sites in Lahore, three sites in Karachi and a head office
in Islamabad.
Lecture’s Agenda
• Origins and Influences

• Basic Concepts and Terminologies

• Goals and Benefits

• Risks and Challenges

Cloud
• “A cloud refers to a distinct IT environment that is designed for the
purpose of remotely provisioning scalable and measured IT
resources.”
Cloud (Cont.)
• IT resources provided by cloud are dedicated to supplying
back-end processing capabilities and user-based access to
these capabilities.
• A cloud can be based on the use of any protocols that
allow for the remote access to its IT resources.
• The party that provides cloud-based IT resources is the
cloud provider.
• The party that uses cloud-based IT resources is the cloud
consumer.
IT Resource (Cont.)
• Figure illustrates how the cloud symbol can be used to define a
boundary for a cloud-based environment that hosts and provisions
a set of IT resources.
IT Resource
• “An IT resource is a physical or virtual IT-related artifact that can be
either software-based (virtual server / custom software program)
or hardware-based ( physical server / network device).”
• Physical servers or hosts are responsible for hosting virtual servers.
On-Premise
• An IT resource that is hosted in a conventional IT enterprise within
an organizational boundary (that does not specifically represent a
cloud) is considered to be located on the premises of the IT
enterprise.
Key Points:
• An on-premise IT resource can access and interact with a cloud-
based IT resource.
• An on-premise IT resource can be moved to a cloud, thereby
changing it to a cloud-based IT resource.
• Redundant deployments of an IT resource can exist in both on-
premise and cloud-based environments.
Example: Primary data on-premises; backup on cloud.
Scaling
• Scaling represents the ability of the IT resource to handle increased
or decreased usage demands.

Types of Scaling:
• Horizontal Scaling
Scaling out and scaling in
• Vertical Scaling
Scaling up and scaling down
Horizontal Scaling
• The horizontal allocation of resources is referred to as scaling out.
• The horizontal releasing of resources is referred to as scaling in.
• Horizontal scaling is a common form of scaling within cloud.
Vertical Scaling
• The replacing of an IT resource with another that has a higher
capacity is referred to as scaling up.

• The replacing an IT resource with another that has a lower capacity

is referred to as scaling down.

• Vertical scaling is less common in cloud due to the downtime

required while the replacement is taking place.
Vertical Scaling (Cont.)
Comparison of Horizontal and
Vertical Scaling
Cloud Service
• A cloud service is any IT resource that is made remotely accessible via a cloud.
• The driving motivation behind cloud computing is to provide IT resources as
services that encapsulate other IT resources, while offering functions for
clients to use and leverage remotely.
Cloud Service (Cont.)
• Cloud service usage conditions are expressed in a service-level
agreement (SLA) that is the human-readable part of a service
contract between a cloud provider and cloud consumer that
describes QoS features, behaviors, and limitations of a cloud-based
service.
• An SLA provides details of measurable characteristics related to IT
outcomes, such as availability, reliability, pricing and performance.
• Since the implementation of a service is hidden from the cloud
consumer, an SLA is a critical specification in the cloud industry.
Cloud Service Consumer
• The cloud service consumer is a temporary runtime role assumed
by a software program when it accesses a cloud service.

Examples of Cloud Service Consumer:

Activity 3
• Draw an architecture that shows three users are using AWS
services. Ali is using AWS S3 storage service to upload data on AWS
physical storage. Eisha is using Elastic Beanstalk service to get a
custom web server. Talha is using EC2 Instance service to deploy a
SQL database server in his cloud environment available on AWS.
Lecture’s Agenda
• Origins and Influences

• Basic Concepts and Terminologies

• Goals and Benefits

• Risks and Challenges

Reduced Investment and Proportional Costs
• Cloud environments are comprised of highly extensive
infrastructure that offers pools of IT resources that can be leased
using a pay-for-use model whereby only the actual usage of the IT
resources is billable.

• When compared to equivalent on-premise environments, clouds

provide the potential for reduced initial investments and
operational costs proportional to measured usage.
Increased Scalability
• The inherent ability of a cloud to scale IT resources enables
organizations to accommodate unpredictable usage fluctuations
without being limited by pre-defined thresholds that may turn
away usage requests from customers.

• The ability of a cloud to decrease required scaling is a feature that

relates directly to the proportional costs benefit.
Increased Availability and Reliability
• By leveraging cloud to make IT resources highly available and
reliable, organizations are able to increase quality-of service
guarantees to customers and reduce or avoid potential loss of
business resulting from unanticipated runtime failures.

• Although many cloud platforms are capable of offering remarkably

high levels of availability and reliability, it comes down to the
guarantees made in the SLA that represent their actual contractual
obligations.
Lecture’s Agenda
• Origins and Influences

• Basic Concepts and Terminologies

• Goals and Benefits

• Risks and Challenges

Increased Security Vulnerabilities
• The moving of business data to the cloud means that the
responsibility over data security becomes shared with the cloud
provider.
• The extent to which the data is secure is now limited to the security
controls and policies applied by both the cloud consumer and cloud
provider.
• The overlapping of organizations’ trust boundaries provide
malicious cloud consumers with greater opportunities to attack IT
resources and steal or damage business data.
• It can be challenging for the cloud provider to offer security
mechanisms that accommodate the security requirements of
multiple cloud service consumers.
Increased Security Vulnerabilities (Cont.)
Reduced Operational Governance Control
• A cloud consumer’s operational governance is limited within cloud
environments due to the control exercised by a cloud provider over
its platforms.
• An unreliable cloud provider may not maintain the guarantees it
makes in the SLAs that were published for its cloud services. This
can jeopardize the quality of the cloud consumer solutions that rely
on these cloud services.
• Longer geographic distances between the cloud consumer and
cloud provider can require additional network hops that introduce
fluctuating latency and potential bandwidth constraints.
Reduced Operational Governance Control
(Cont.)
Limited Portability Between Cloud Providers
• Portability is a measure used to determine the impact of moving
cloud consumer IT resources and data between clouds.

• Due to a lack of established industry standards within the cloud

computing industry, public clouds are commonly proprietary to
various extents.

• For cloud consumers that have custom-built solutions with

dependencies on proprietary cloud environments, it can be
challenging to move from one cloud provider to another.
Limited Portability Between Cloud Providers
(Cont.)
Multi-Regional Compliance and Legal Issues
• The geographical location of data and IT resources can be out of a
cloud consumer’s control when hosted by a third-party cloud
provider. This can introduce various legal and regulatory
compliance concerns.
Examples:
• Some UK laws require personal data belonging to UK citizens to be
kept within the United Kingdom.
• An European cloud consumer’s data that is located in the U.S. is
easily accessible by the US government agencies (due to the U.S.
Patriot Act) when compared to data located in many European
Union countries.
Additional Resources
• Cloud Computing – Concepts, Technology, and Architecture
by Thomas Erl, Zaigham Mahmood, and Ricardo Puttini
Chapter 3: Understanding Cloud Computing
Questions?