B. Discuss key enabling technologies in cloud computing systems.

A cloud system or cloud computing technology refers to the computing components

(hardware, software and infrastructure) that enable the delivery of cloud computing services.
Cloud computing is an amalgamation of pre-existing technologies working in a seamless
manner to provide the services to the end clients. Apart from the functional needs of high speed
low cost and scalable computing there are some technological forces which paved the way for
the evolution of cloud computing. These technological enablers are:

i. Virtualization Technology
Virtualization of hardware and software resources has played a prominent role in
the development of cloud computing paradigm. Virtualization traces its roots back in
1960’s where this technology was used in mainframe systems to logically dividing the
mainframes' resources for different applications.
Virtualization gives user the illusion of full access of system resources which in
fact may be shared by multiple users. Virtualization achieves this illusion by separating
hardware from the operating systems. It installs an abstraction layer known as Hypervisor
or Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) between hardware and operating system which
emulates the set of operating system hardware and user level instruction.
Virtualization is a technique to create a virtual version of operating system,
network, CPU, server, storage devices, etc. Virtualization is an integrated solution to
increase the resource utilization in a data center.

ii. Web Services

Cloud computing is a paradigm shift from Application Oriented Architecture to
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). A Service Oriented Architecture is a set of collection
of web services. Web services are self-contained, self-describing, platform independent
programs that can be invoked over the Internet.
The Orchestration of web services in a particular manner can be exposed as a single
web service to solve a particular activity over the Internet. The advent of web 2.0
contributed in gluing up the web services together with the help of a new programming
technique called AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), REST (Representational
State Transfer), RSS (Really Simple Syndication). AJAX is a technique to update the web
6
 pages without reloading the complete page. RSS distributes the up-to-date information to
the web pages dynamically. The data exposed by the REST and RSS are extracted by a
technique called a mashup. A mashup is defined as a website or web application that uses
content or services from more than one source to create a completely new service.

iii. Software Technology Innovations

Key players of cloud computing have innovated new technologies to exploit
benefits of cloud computing. For example Google has its proprietary MapReduce
framework which can be employed in parallel and distributed environment to process
unstructured data. Bigtable a storage management system is innovated to store petabytes
of data. Hadoop is an open source implementation of MapReduce framework built on top
of Hadoop file system. Cloud computing uses this frameworks to process huge amount of
data in cloud clusters. For example Hadoop is used by Yahoo, Facebook, LinkedIn, and
Netflix in their cloud environment.

iv. Autonomic Computing

Autonomic Computing is a type of computing model in which the system is self-
managing and adapt to the unpredictable changes. It is a collection of various existing
technologies, including adaptive algorithms, human-computer interaction, machine
learning algorithms, artificial intelligence algorithms, software agents, robotics, etc.
Autonomic computing means computing without or least human intervention. It is helpful
to minimize the time required by the computer professional to resolve the system
difficulties and the other maintenance work like software updates.

v. Utility and Grid Computing

The current model of cloud computing is an evolution of grid computing. Both the
computing paradigms are based on utility computing. Utility computing is a service
delivering model in which a service provider makes available the required resources to the
customer and charges them for specific usage rather than a fixed rate. Cloud differs from

6
 grid computing in the sense that the cloud provides user-centric interfaces and does not
require learning new commands and API as required in the case of grid computing.

In the nut of shell, cloud computing has been evolved by the advancement in various
technologies e.g. Distributed computing (cluster, Grid Computing etc.), internet technologies
(Service-oriented architecture (SOA), web 3.0 etc.), hardware Technologies (multi-core chips,
virtualizations etc.) and system management technologies e.g. autonomic computing.