Introduction to Cloud Computing
Question:
Discuss about the ITC595 MIT Cloud Computing.
Cloud computing can be considered as a very new technology. This includes the development of the parallel computing, distributed computing, grid computing and all the combination and evaluation of the different things, which includes the virtualization, utility computing, software-as-a- service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). The use of the term cloud is done as a Metaphor and this is done for the purpose of defining the web as a space which mainly consists of the pre-installed computing environment and is associated with providing various type of services. For the users the cloud computing is considered as a “Pay-per-use-on-demand” mode which can be accessed conveniently and the IT resources can be shared in an easy way by making use of the internet. The resources of the IT mainly includes the network, server, storage, application, service and many more (Ali, Khan & Vasilakos, 2015). For all this reason it is easy to deploy the cloud computing in a very easy and quick way assisted by least management. This also includes the interactions with the service providers as well. Cloud computing has been associated with the increase of the availability of various resources and there also exists several additional benefits when compared to normal computing. Users are capable of using the IT infrastructure with Pay-per-Use-On-Demand mode which would be initially helping them in earning a lot of benefits along with helping them in saving the cost which is required to buy the physical resources.
The utilization of cloud computing is mainly involved with the use of cloud features. In case of cloud computing features, the resources are hosted in a remote place and remote processing usually does its accessing. The resources are usually stored in third party places that are responsible for storing them. There are various vendors in place who are associated with providing such amount of cloud solutions for companies or enterprises to operate (Almorsy, Grundy & Müller, 2016).There are three features of cloud computing. The first is the transmission of data to the cloud structure. The second feature is the transmission of data from the vendor side to the client side. The last feature of this process is the storage of the data in the cloud provided to the client.
The cloud computing technology involves the hosting of resources in cloud spaces which can then be utilized for remote operations. The relevant technologies of the cloud solutions are the IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. IaaS is termed as infrastructure as a service, which is mainly involved in providing infrastructure based solutions that can be easily provided over internet. Similarly, the PaaS is termed as platform as a service which is concerned with the provisioning of software or hardware tools to the client for making their own application (Botta et al., 2016).Lastly, the SaaS is the software as a service is involved with providing access to cloud applications that can be used for various application specific operations.
In case of IaaS, the relevant application is the virtualization processes. In this case, the hosted applications are the servers or data centers which can be provided to the clients for addressing in their business activities. The application of PaaS technology includes the acquisition of cloud solutions for their needs. Virtualized technology is also another application of this technology (Beloglazov, Abawajy & Buyya, 2012). Lastly, the software suites are the main applications of the SaaS technology of cloud computing. In this case, the software suites are provided to the client for addressing them in their business activities.
Features of Cloud Computing
Software as a Service (SaaS): The consumers of the Cloud have realized the need of hosting their application which can be accessed by making use of the networks from various clients which might include the Web browser, PDA, and many more, by different users of the application. There exists no control by the Cloud consumers over the infrastructure of the cloud and often this is responsible for adopting a multi-tenancy system architecture, which includes the different cloud consumers’ applications. This are later organized in a single logical environment in the SaaS cloud for the purpose of achieving the economies related to the scale and also the optimization of the speed, security, availability, disaster recovery and maintenance (Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2016). Examples of SaaS include SalesForce.com, Google Mail, Google Docs, and so forth.
Platform As A Service (PaaS): PaaS can be considered as a development platform which is associated with supporting the full “Software Lifecycle” which is initially responsible for allowing the consumers of the cloud to develop various cloud services and applications (e.g. SaaS) directly upon the PaaS cloud. So it can be stated there exists a major difference between the SaaS and PaaS which means that the SaaS is only associated with hosting the completed cloud applications whereas PaaS is associated with offering a platform for the development which is responsible for hosting both completed as well as the in-progress cloud applications (Wei et al., 2014). PaaS is required, along with the supporting application present in the hosting environment. This is done for the purpose of posing the development infrastructure. The infrastructure mainly includes the programming environment, tools, configuration management, and many more. An example of PaaS is Google AppEngine.
Infrastructure as A Service (IaaS): Cloud consumers are associated with use of different IT infrastructures which includes the “processing, storage, networks and other fundamental computing resources”. This are generally provided by the IaaS cloud. The use of the Virtualization at an extensive rate in the IaaS cloud is done and this is done for the purpose of integrating or decomposing the various physical resources in an ad-hoc manner. This is done for the purpose of meeting the growing or shrinking of the resource demanded by the cloud users. Virtualization’s basic strategy mainly includes the setting up of an independent virtual machines (VM). This VM’s are isolated from the underlying hardware as well as from the other VMs (Zissis & Lekkas, 2012). It is also to be notice that this strategy can be defines as a totally different thing as compared to the multi tenancy model. This is mainly aimed at transforming the application software architecture. This is done in order to make sure that the received multiple instances from various cloud consumers are capable of running as a similar logic machine. An example of IaaS is Amazon’s EC2
Data as A Service (DAAS): Delivering of the on demand virtualized storage has led to a formation of a totally separate Cloud service – data storage service. Along with this it is also to be noticed that considering the DaaS a special form of the IaaS is also possible. The motivation of this includes a database system based on premise enterprise and this are often tied in a prohibitive upfront cost present in the server. Besides this it os a totally dedicated, software license, post-delivery services and inhouse IT maintenance. DaaS is associated with allowing the clients to pay for the services that are being used by them actually instead of paying for the site license of the entire database. Along with the storage interfaces which are traditional like the RDBMS and file systems, there also exists some offerings of the DaaS which are associated with providing a table-style abstractions (Li et al., 2013). This are mainly designed for scaling the storage and for the retrieval of the data which are huge in amount along with presenting them in different time frames which might be very compressed, or too large, or too expensive or too slow for most commercial RDBMS to cope with. Examples of this kind of DaaS include Amazon S3, Google BigTable, and Apache HBase, etc.
The Benefits of Cloud Computing
Issues In Cloud Computing:
Cloud computing is associated with providing of infinite number of computing resources which are provided according to the demand and this mainly happens due to the high scalable nature of the cloud computing. This is initially responsible for the elimination of the various needs for Cloud service providers which is mainly done for the purpose of planning for the provisioning methods over the hardware. There exists many companies, like the Amazon, Google, Microsoft and many more are associated with accelerating their paces in the process of development of the various cloud computing systems this is initially responsible for enhancing the various services which are provided to a larger amount of users. This paper is mainly associated with investigate the various security and privacy concerns present in the cloud computing systems and this are mainly provided by numerous amount of companies (Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2016). According to the definition of the cloud computing which states that this is an applications which is associated with delivering different type of services over the Internet as well as the infrastructures which might include the hardware and systems software in the data centres. Initially this are associated with providing this type of this services. By depending on the investigation about the various concerns regarding the security and privacy has been provided by different companies is not adequate, and initially this has resulted in the creation of obstacle which are faced by the users while they try to adapt the cloud computing systems. So it is necessary that more concerns on security issues, such as availability, confidentiality, data integrity, control, and audit and many more and it is compulsory to take all this into account.
The main challenge of the cloud computing technology is the need to know the location of the data resource. As the cloud solution vendors usually know data storage that is done in the cloud, the client is not aware of the actual location of the data. This is the main security challenge because in case there is a breach in system, the whole resource will be lost. The next challenge is the disaster mitigation problems (Chaisiri, Lee & Niyato, 2012). In case of a disaster occurrence, the need to back up the system is required. As the cloud resources are carried by the LAN technologies, the speed of backing up is slow. For this reason, the business aspects take much time to get online.
The different issues in the cloud computing has been listed below:
- Privacy: Cloud computing is associated with the utilization of various virtual computing technology along with this the various personal data of the user can also be stored in a in several virtual data centres rather than keeping them in a single physical location, besides this the hidden information also might get leaked while the users are accessing the various cloud computing services (Hashizume et al., 2013). Beside this the attackers are also capable of analysing the critical task which are generally dependent on the tasks related to computing and are generally submitted by the users.
- Reliability: There exists several situations when the server of the cloud might experience a downtime and this would be responsible for slowing down the local server.
- Legal Issues: Different types of risks are associated with the measures related to the safety and the confidentiality of an individual throughout the entire legislative levels.
- Compliance: There exists several rules which are responsible for pertaining the storage and the data is generally associated with requiring regular reporting along with trails for the audit (Chaisiri, Lee & Niyato, 2012). Besides this, the requirements of the customers along with the data centres are maintained by the cloud providers only.
- Freedom: Cloud computing is not associated with allowing the users to have a physical access to the storage of the data which is initially responsible for leaving the storage of the data storage along with the controls of the storage in the hands of cloud providers.
- Long- Term Viability: it is to be made sure that the data which are being uploaded to the clouds will never become invalid even after the closure of the cloud computing provider or have been acquired and swallowed up by a larger company.
- Issues in Cloud Interoperability:
7.1) Intermediary Layer: numerous work have been associated with addressing the issues related to interoperability and this is done by means of providing an intermediary layer which would be existing between the consumers of the cloud and the resources which are cloud-specific for example the VM.
7.2) Open Standard: Standardization is considered to a very much beneficial solution for the purpose of addressing the several issues related to interoperability. But due to the reason that the cloud computing technology has just started to take off, the interoperability problem has not appeared on the pressing agenda of major industry cloud vendors (Xiao, Song & Chen, 2013).
7.3) Open API: SUN has recently been associated with the launching of the Sun Open Cloud Platform under the Creative Commons license. One of the major contribution of this platform includes the proposed (in-progress) cloud API. It is also associated with defining a set of clear and easy-to-understand Restful Web services interfaces, by this the consumers of the cloud are capable of creating and managing the various resources of the cloud, and this also includes the compute, storage, and networking components in a unified way.
7.4) SaaS and PaaS Interoperability: Besides the solutions which has been provided before are generally associated with tackling the interoperability problems of the IaaS, interoperability of the SaaS and are often associated with involving the different application domains which mainly includes the ERP, CRM, and many more (Garg, Versteeg & Buyya, 2013). Specialized Group of experts in the field of data mining have raised the issue of creating data mining standards on the cloud, along with this their focus is mainly aimed at “the practical use of statistical algorithms, reliable production deployment of models and the integration of predictive analytics” across different data mining-based SaaS clouds. Discovery of the PaaS interoperability not yet been done and this has happened because the PaaS mainly involves the entire software development life-cycle on the cloud. Besides this it would be very much difficult to reach the uniformity while considering the ways by which the consumers develop and deploy cloud applications.
The gaps that were present in the traditional business model have been addressed due to the introduction of cloud technology. For this reason, the cloud computing technology involved the provision of cloud solutions to their clients mainly in the form of hosted solutions (Hashem et al., 2015). As a result, the introduction of cloud software or cloud infrastructure is now able to solve their problem of data hosting and storage.
The main gaps present in the cloud computing technology are the security aspects. The cloud is always subjected to various problems which have to be addressed. The security and privacy is the main requirement of the cloud solutions and the vendors need to utilize various safety measures to enhance their security. The most common cloud attacks are the DDoS attacks. These are involved in flooding a massive amount of traffic to the system that crashes the server. The attacker then utilizes this opportunity to get access to the system (Wang et al., 2012). This type of security problems are to be solved by the vendors of cloud solutions.
This is a critical issue in the adoption of cloud computing in the market. If the resources from a cloud are lost, the most affected stakeholder is the client. This will lead them to loss of business revenue streams. As a result, the company can also lose their brand value in the market. For this reason, this security aspects needs to be referenced properly.
The cloud computing technology involves the hosting of resources in cloud spaces which can then be utilized for remote operations. The relevant technologies of the cloud solutions are the IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. IaaS is termed as infrastructure as a service, which is mainly involved in providing infrastructure based solutions that can be easily provided over internet. Similarly, the PaaS is termed as platform as a service, which is concerned with the provisioning of software or hardware, tools to the client for making their own application (Fernando, Loke & Rahayu, 2013). Lastly, the SaaS is the software as a service is involved with providing access to cloud applications that can be used for various application specific operations.
- In case of IaaS, the relevant application is the virtualization processes. In this case, the hosted applications are the servers or data centers which can be provided to the clients for addressing in their business activities. The application of PaaS technology includes the acquisition of cloud solutions for their needs. Virtualized technology is also another application of this technology. Lastly, the software suites are the main applications of the SaaS technology of cloud computing (Dinh et al., 2013). In this case, the software suites are provided to the client for addressing them in their business activities.
- Characteristics of the Cloud computing
Cloud computing consists of a feature which helps the users in accessing the various information, applications or the other services by taking assistance from the browser by notwithstanding the device which are being used and also the location of the user. The infrastructure which is mostly provided by a third-party can be accessed by taking assistance from the web. Price has also been reduced to a major level and this has happened because of the reason that the infrastructure is provided by a third-party. IT skills required for handling and implementation of this technology is also less. Besides this the Reliable services are often obtained by employing a multiple sites which are appropriate for the continuity of the business and recovering from any type of disaster. The maintenance of the cloud is also very much simple because there is no need of put this in every user’s PC (Jadeja & Modi, 2012). Pay per use facility helps in permitting the usage of application per shopper on regular bases. Performance is often monitored and so it’s ascendible. Security is also pretty much as good as or higher than ancient systems and due to this reason the suppliers are being capable of devoting their resources to resolution security problems which cannot be afforded by several customers. However, security still remains a crucial concern once the information is sort of confidential.
The utilization of the cloud computing is a successful business model if the issues pertaining to the security and the privacy can be addressed. For this reason, the vendors of the cloud solution need to adopt the utilization of the security mechanisms like authentication or encryption in their system.
Cloud computing systems can achieve the following five goals together:
Cloud computing systems can achieve the following five goals together:
- Data integrity: Cloud system generally means preserving the information integrity which means not lose or get modified by any unauthorized users. Because of the reason that the data are the base for providing cloud computing services, which might include the Data as a Service, Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, keeping data integrity is one of the major fundamental task.
- Confidentiality: This means the data of the user should be kept as a secret in the cloud systems. This can be done by adopting two basic approaches which includes the physical isolation and cryptography, in order to achieve confidentiality, which is to be extensively adopted by the cloud computing vendors (Xu, 2012).
- Audit: This means keeping a watch on whatever is happening in the cloud system. Auditability might be included as an additional layer in the various virtualized operation system which are generally hosted on the virtual machine in order to provide facilities like watching what is happening in the system or what has already happed in the system. This is much more secure than that is built into the applications or into the software themselves, because this is capable of watch the entire duration of access (Dinh et al., 2013).
- Availability: The main goal of availability for cloud computing systems mainly includes the providing of ensure that the user would be capable of using the clouds anytime from anywhere. Due to the fact that this is having a web-native nature, cloud computing system has been associated with enabling its users to access the system.
- Control: this generally refers to the regulation of using the system, which might include the applications, its infrastructure and the data (Arora, Parashar & Transforming, 2013).
Conclusion
This paper has been associate with discussing about the architecture and various platforms of cloud computing technology which are very much popular. The paper has also been associated with discussing the various challenges and issues that are faced by the cloud technology. Despite of the existence of different limitations and advantages there also exists the need for better methodologies processes. Besides all this the cloud computing is an emerging technology and is also considered as a highly attractive paradigm, mainly for the large enterprises. Cloud computing is also considered as a new paradigm of computing utilities which has been associated in promising to provide more flexibility, less expense, and more efficiency in IT services to end users.
References
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