Computer Science

For what reasons has cloud computing become a

highly preferred option for business-oriented
computing?

Word Count: 3878

Number of Pages: 15
Table of Contents

Introduction 4

Defining the Cloud 7

Cloud Deployment 8

Coding Languages 10

Dispersion Dilemma 12

Security Concerns 13

Conclusion 15

Works Cited 17

Appendix

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Introduction

Moore’s Law, the idea which proposes that computer processor speeds would improve

twofold every two years is representative of the entire computing industry. Not only has

hardware seen its share of rapid growth, but in tandem architecture, software, and infrastructure

have all seen the same growth and development. Just half a century ago one would need punch

cards to perform simple arithmetic on a computer system that took up an entire room. With

modern computing, tools are readily available, and hardware has advanced to the point that

complex programs with multitudes of functions can be accessed on devices smaller than our

hands. One such tool that has provided a renaissance in the way computer industry professionals,

specifically software engineers, web developers, and information-technologies professionals, all

approach their work is the cloud. This cloud, representing the idea of nonlocal computing has

evolved rapidly throughout the first two decades of the 21st century. Once a tool that allowed

remote access to computers on other networks, the cloud has evolved into a business computing

mainstay with providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and IBM Cloud

pioneering developments in cloud technologies. The versatility of the cloud through various

deployments has led to its adoption in different corners of the tech industry while the issues of

security, dispersion, and latency surrounding cloud and are being diminished at a rapid pace

thanks to the wide adoption of the cloud; furthermore, the advent of cloud computing

technologies has given great growth to computer technology in businesses and has completely

revolutionized the way that business use the internet as a tool in the 21st century. Although

Moore’s Law has taken great effect for computing technology, enabling cloud technology to

quickly develop, it has, in recent years, come into a slowdown. Lieven Eeckhout, computer
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science professor at Ghent University notes that, “the current state of Moore’s law seems

somewhat unclear. In 2016, Intel announced that it is slowing the pace with which it will launch

new chip technology nodes.4 The gap between successive generations of chips with new, smaller

transistors will widen, as it is becoming increasingly more difficult to miniaturize transistors in a

cost-effective way for production” (Eeckhout 4). This does not mean however, that the

development of cloud technology has stalled in a debilitating sense. In fact, cloud technology is

continuing to advance at a rapid pace compared to other industries and even other sectors of the

tech space. Eeckhout addresses this pace by highlighting that consumer technology development

is “generally a few years behind in terms of shrinking transistors and new manufacturing

technologies” (Eeckhout 5). This continuing growth is thanks in part to the versatility of the

cloud in both consumer and business applications. The cloud is a highly lucrative monetization

tool for providers who can diversify their offerings to both types of buyers. Google has, for

example, utilized their services like Drive, Docs, Slides, and Gmail to create a cloud-based

ecosystem for consumers which draws them in to further buy hardware which is closely tied to

the services like Pixel phones and Chromebooks. In addition to their seamless cloud-based

consumer ecosystem, Google has, like many other tech companies, taken great strides to provide

businesses with tools through the cloud.

Defining the Cloud

Microsoft defines cloud computing by saying, “Simply put, cloud computing is the

delivery of computing services—servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and

more—over the Internet (“the cloud”)” (Azure np). Furthermore, Amazon follows with a similar

definition: “Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of compute power, database storage,

applications, and other IT resources through a cloud services platform via the internet with pay-

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as-you-go pricing” (Types np). Through these definitions, the cloud can be broken down into its

base components of hosting and deployment. Hosting refers to the back end of the cloud, where

developers can manage their software and IT professionals can manage infrastructure through

virtual machines. Services, simply put, is the way that users access the resources hosted on the

cloud. Resources are deployed through different cloud services which target different use cases.

Each deployment method is unique in its use case because the resources accessed vary between

each service archetype. Although the metaphoric name of the cloud can make it abstract and hard

to visualize, the actual cloud that exists in hardware form is quite simple. Cloud providers use PC

systems set up in large-scale arrays within dedicated facilities that promote efficiency and

homogeneity of management. The cloud’s benefit is not in computing power, for the cloud’s

greatest benefit is in its physical infrastructure. The cloud is modular, flexible, serviceable, and

scalable; everything that local systems cannot be. This unprecedented advantage is useful for

businesses of any size and is growing in uses daily (Minkiewicz 4). The cloud's deployment is

divided into public, private, community, and hybrid clouds. The public cloud is directly

contrasted to the private cloud were the public is provided by companies such as Amazon,

Google, and Microsoft. The public cloud is unique as it is the only type of cloud fully

administrated outside of the company that uses it. Other cloud types include some form of setup

and maintenance by the companies that use it; for instance, the private cloud is maintained and

used exclusively by one organization but can be hosted and maintained by a third-party provider.

The community cloud is like the private cloud; however, it is shared between multiple

organizations. Lastly, the hybrid cloud is defined by Arlene Minkiewics as: "the combined use of

multiple types of clouds linked together through unique interfaces to allow organizations to

optimize their use of the cloud without exposing themselves to potential risks of a public or

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community cloud" (Minkiewics 5). Each setup has its benefits and its limitations; however,

public cloud remains the most popular. The public cloud is cited by Microsoft as their offering

with “high reliability through a vast network of servers to ensure against failures” (Azure np).

The most reputable providers tout a very high capacity for cloud fallback and backup. Google,

through their Coldline cloud data storage service is able to store backup data and long-term

archive data for as little as “$0.007 - $0.014 per GB/month” (Cloud np). This competitive pricing

is only beat out by Amazon’s Glacier which lacks key features such as cross-platform API. With

the extremely competitive pricing of public cloud storage, many popular online services such as

Spotify and Vimeo have migrated to public cloud providers. With the public cloud, they no

longer need to maintain their data nor the network of servers that it is stored on. Although the

public cloud is by far a popular option for many businesses, the private cloud model remains in

use for many. One such case is with hospitals who need all their patient data to remain stored in

HIPPA compliant storage. In this case, the hospital benefits from private cloud as they can

design and maintain their own system while still maintaining the benefits of a cloud network

compared to a traditional computer system. “The private cloud offers many of the same benefits

as the public cloud, but it gives organizations more control over their data because they do not

need to consider other enterprises and organizations. The private cloud is also deployed within

the organizations security protocols (O’Dowd np).” For many businesses though, a combination

of both public and private cloud deployments makes most sense, and this is where the hybrid

cloud comes in. The hybrid cloud enables secure interfacing between a public and private cloud,

enabling the more at-risk information to be stored within the private cloud yet still accessible

securely by the public cloud. Overall, while each deployment holds its quirks, a business has the

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freedom to choose one or combine cloud deployment methods to build the system that best suits

their specific use case.

Cloud Deployment

The cloud is made available through three service archetypes known as Software,

Platform, and Infrastructure as a service. Although they are all named ‘as a service’, the three

cloud service archetypes vary in their purpose and deployment. According to Amazon Web

Services, world leading cloud provider, "IaaS, contains the basic building blocks for cloud IT

and typically provide access to networking features, computers (virtual or on dedicated

hardware), and data storage space" (Types). In essence, this means that IT professionals can

easily manage their workforce's access to dedicated hardware through the cloud. For example, an

engineer at a company would access a powerful computer capable of running CAD software

through a dumb terminal via IaaS cloud distribution. "Rather than purchasing, provisioning and

maintaing servers, data center and network equipment, end users utilize computer infrastructure,

generally through a platform virtualization environment, through the Internet (Minkiewics 5). No

longer is the business itself responsible for the management of its computer system, for now the

cloud provider ensures that the hardware they provide is up to date and functional. Developer

Tom Marsden at Marathon consulting has said that “[cloud services] have taken the load off of

us and placed it in the hands of people that are dedicated to that kind of work, leaving us to

develop code rather than manage servers.” This enables massive cost reduction for companies as

they can downsize their IT department and focus resources away from computer system

management and the associated headache. Amazon defines PaaS as "Platforms as a service

remove the need for organizations to manage the underlying infrastructure (usually hardware and

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operating systems) and allow you to focus on the deployment and management of your

applications" (Types np). Developers at Virginia Beach based firm Marathon Consulting have

stated that "Azure (Microsoft's PaaS offering) makes development easy since tools are provided

to ensure smooth collaboration between individuals. We are able to communicate with each other

seamlessly across Azure. Also, Git integration with Azure means that we have our own version

control whether it be through GitHub or our own repo." Along with the cloud itself, providers

such as Microsoft create local tools such as Visual Studio that create an easy to use cloud

ecosystem for developers. The benefits to PaaS include time saving and standardization of

development. Finally, Amazon defines SaaS as "a completed product that is run and managed by

the service provider" (Types). Popular examples of SaaS include the Google Suite, Office 365,

and Adobe Creative Cloud. According to Amazon "With a SaaS offering you do not have to

think about how the service is maintained or how the underlying infrastructure is managed; you

only need to think about how you will use that particular piece software" (Types np). By

providing APIs for their cloud, providers enable developers to bypass the stage of infrastructure

design, and in effect, developers can put more resources into the actual product's front end. The

options given to businesses by cloud providers demonstrates the versatility of the cloud, for it is

used on the IT front, developer front, and consumer front. There are few other branches of

computer infrastructure that can boast such versatility.

Coding Languages

Languages in Computer Science are the subject of great debate and are highly scrutinized

in their purpose and usage. What makes the cloud a viable platform for the great majority of

developers is the numerous options available such as .NET, Java, PHP, Ruby, Python, and

Node.js to name a few. Startup Business Development Manager for Amazon Joseph K. Ziegler

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writes that there are “three aspects related to programming stacks: The Characteristics of the

Language, your Local Ecosystem and the Problem Domain you are solving” (Ziegler np). Each

language has its unique quirks and characteristics that attract developers to harness it for their

cloud platform. Ziegler writes that languages can be divided into “statically compiled and

strongly typed or dynamic and interpretive on the other” (Ziegler np). Historically, interpreted

languages held a clear disadvantage to compiled languages in efficiency; however, this is no

longer the case as popular interpreted languages such as JavaScript, PHP, and Python have seen

drastic performance increases as their developer communities have grown. Furthermore, the

current landscape of computer programming languages is demonstrating that web technologies

such as cloud computing are on the rise in both popularity from developers and demand from the

economy. Stack Overflow reports that in their 2018 developer survey, JavaScript has remained

the most popular language amongst professional developers for its sixth year in a row. This

coincides with the popularity of the Node.js, a JavaScript framework that is designed specifically

for use with web technologies, including cloud computing. According to Jackson Stone at the

University of Tennessee Chattanooga, what makes Node unique is that “it makes a server into a

faceless browser that executes JavaScript code continuously, waiting for requests from users. It

is all asynchronous by default, meaning whenever I/O operations are taking place it can continue

to run, while a chunk of code is pushed onto a worker, which waits to hear back from the

database. In other words, there is no downtime” (Stone 28). Node has also led to the blurring of

the line between front end and back end developers, for “the advent of Node also meant

developers that had been programming client-side scripts (front-end developers) could start to do

server-side programming (back-end developers). After Node.js, conceivably, companies only

needed to heavily hire JavaScript developers, which were already plentiful due to preexisting

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demand (Stone 29). Stone reports that JavaScript is healthy in both the current and future

developer communities as currently there are 57,772 positions for JavaScript developers on

popular job posting site GlassDoor. Furthermore, 54.5% of developers on StackOverflow use

JavaScript for their work. Lastly, on GitHub, JavaScript is the most popular language by far

(Stone 28). Node and JavaScript have seamless integration with the cloud through the Node

Project Manager which handles the importing of various packages to servers, enabling cloud

computers to forego downtime when updating packages. Although JavaScript has cemented itself

as the front runner of web and cloud programming languages, and Node shows no signs of losing

its solid lead too, it is important to note that other frameworks and languages are strong and

specialized in ways that JavaScript and Node cannot be. Stone concludes that, “the languages in

use on servers are as numerous as they are diverse. Countless webstacks in circulation each have

different fundamental philosophical approaches to the task of web development. They each have

certain strengths and goals, and each has within it a nugget to learn from (Stone 47). Overall,

these findings support the notion that cloud computing is the way forward because the developer

community both uses and praises the languages and frameworks that support the cloud. The

strength of JavaScript and Note demonstrate a clear agreement between developers on which

technology to push which will lead to faster progress due to collaboration and the creation of

packages through NPM.

Dispersion Dilemma

The cloud has remained an extremely competitive market with many providers finding

success, Joe Weinman highlights this by saying that although “some believe that within a few

years, only a handful of cloud providers will exist… the industry is likely to have a diverse

ecosystem of players” (Weinman 336). The cloud is no different to other pay as you use

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industries like the hotel industry, for instead of renting a room to stay for the night, businesses

simply rent space for which their computer systems reside. In fact, cloud providers can be

thought of as the hotels for computer systems. Weinman asserts that “as of the U.S. economic

census (2007), the 4 largest firms accounted for 19% of industry revenues., the 20 largest ones

accounted for 36%, and even the 50 largest service providers didn’t break the 50% mark”

(Weinman 337). The cloud, Weinman argues, will remain a broad, open market with different

providers with their own specialties to attract businesses and users to their platform.

Furthermore, the most prohibitive factor to the consolidation of cloud providers has become

latency and response time. There is a fine balancing act for providers in managing the number of

available nodes and the processing power of each node; Weinman uses an example of a 100-

processor budget to demonstrate that compute power can hypothetically be divided into nodes of

100 processors, 10 processors, or 1 processor. The issue is that by “dispersing resources more

and more, we improve response times by reducing network latency and network transport costs,

but we reduce the benefit from parallelization” (Weinman 269). The opposite is true for

increasing parallel processing due to the nature of limited budgets. This, dispersion dilemma, as

Weinman calls it, allows many cloud providers to remain viable options despite the expansion of

big players such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Latency is highly tied to dispersion as it is

location and distance dependent. Customers in Asia’s large tech markets require responsive

service despite the world’s largest cloud providers being based in the United States. This either

pushes companies to expand with worldwide server locations, as with Microsoft’s Azure

platform, or opens geographic markets to other providers. Because of this dispersion dilemma,

cloud providers each deploy their services in locations they believe their services will perform

the best; for example, Microsoft plans to offer two “Azure Regions” in South Africa, a region

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which neither Google nor Amazon Web Services have announced intentions to expand in (Azure

np). Dispersion is not only a matter of strictly computer founded issues; it also deals with highly

practical issues. Specifically, Weinman cites “smoking-hole” disasters where “equipment is out

of service and data is unrecoverable” as a main reason to disperse cloud resources (Weinman

271). Furthermore, provisioning and maintaining backups of data centers is made easier through

dispersion. A single facility requires a backup facility of equal capacity; “100% overhead.”

Weinman points out that “if you have two facilities, each with 50% of the live resources, it only

takes a third facility sized to be the same as one of the faculties to recover (50% overhead) …”

(Weinman 271). He further states that the ratio of facilities to overhead continues in the same

inverse correlation by writing that “as [the number of facilities] increases, the marginal cost of

continuity assurance (the overhead) approaches zero” (Weinman 271). In contrast to dispersion,

the consolidation of cloud resources also has benefits that should not be looked over.

Consolidation greatly enables the parallelization, which is the simultaneous execution of

processes across multiple processors. Weinman explains that a provider would not allow “no

more than 20% of a capacity to be allocated to a given customer. Of course, the amount of

capacity directly increases with consolidation; but in addition, the efficiency of the capacity

increases with the consolidation due to parallel processing. Thus, the correlation between

consolidation and capacity is not direct and linear, instead it is exponential.

Security Concerns

Cloud computing, although highly successful and praised in recent years, has not gone

without its fair share of issues. The main issues that damage cloud computing as a viable

platform for businesses are security, downtime, and inflexibility between platforms, commonly

known as platform lock-in. Firstly, security is a commonly addressed issue concerning all types

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of clouds, but mainly the public clouds of major providers. Because major providers such as

Google and Amazon have lowered the barrier of access to cloud computing, they have become

easier targets for malicious uses such as botnet hosting. Botnets are not inherently malicious as

they are simply "connected computers coordinated together to perform a task" (What np).

Typically, botnets take over computers through invasive malware included in downloads, trojan

horses, or other forms of attack. One such botnet, known as Mirai, Japanese translating to

miracle, was able to create DDoS attacks generating 1Tbps of connection bandwidth. "At its

peak, Mirai infected over 600,000 vulnerable IoT (Internet of Things) devices" (Inside np).

Where Mirai differs from cloud-based attacks is its growth phase. Mirai needed to search for and

then infect devices before it could proceed with its attack; if undetected, a cloud-based attack

could be even easier to host.. On the cloud however, botnets do not need to invade a system as

they can be hosted on computers through the cloud provider. This forces providers to scan over

the activities of cloud users which does not bode well for privacy concerns. Analysis of cloud

providers demonstrates rapid growth of malicious botnets, for "According to Spamhaus

research... Amazon alone hosted 303 C&C servers in 2017 compared with 36 in 2016" (Sheridan

np). Members of the UC Berkley CS department point out that despite the relative ease of botnet

creation on cloud networks, “botnets in the cloud are easier to shut down than traditional

botnets” (Chen). This stems from the fact that traditional botnets are decentralized and not easily

traceable where cloud hosted botnets are consolidated through one provider. Although security

remains a pressing issue within cloud computing, cloud providers have taken more than ample

measures to ensure that the cloud remains secure and protected from malicious activity. (need to

really edit the essay down so I can fit a section about how the providers have furthered security

despite the issues present.)

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Conclusion

The clout that cloud computing has created in business computing is clearly justified as

the benefits that the cloud has drawn since its inception have helped to expand business

opportunities online. The sheer versatility of the cloud has led to its applications in many areas

ranging from developers using PaaS, IT through IaaS, and consumer software through SaaS. IaaS

has enabled companies to downsize their IT departments to reduce cost and simplify the jobs of

the professionals that they employ. Despite concerns of the cloud’s security, IaaS still gains

popularity with businesses because cloud providers constantly provide new methods to secure

the cloud. PaaS has simplified development of large software projects and has provided

collaborative tools and frameworks. Popular options such as Microsoft Azure and the .NET

framework have streamlined work for software development companies like Marathon

Consulting. Finally, SaaS has completely changed the way that tech companies interact with

their users. No longer do companies release standalone versions of their software; companies

now push incremental updates to software through the cloud. The cloud, due to its flexible and

customizable nature has led to benefits for companies of all sizes and all budgets; furthermore,

the reductions in cost for data storage have led to extremely competetive Thanks to major

providers using a pay per use business model, the cloud has remained cost effective despite the

volume of usage that companies require. The continuing dispersion dilemma is less of a problem

than a benefit to cloud consumers as it forces companies to specialize their offerings for certain

geographic markets. Although there are clearly three major cloud providers in Amazon,

Microsoft, and Google, there are many other firms that exist as viable alternatives for specific

use cases. In practicality, the market for cloud computing will remain healthy due to the global

nature of the internet and the rapidly increasing reliance on computers in the world. The impact

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 of the cloud to business computing is due in great part to its versatility and cost effectiveness,

and the future of the cloud is bright as the still relatively young cloud industry has great

potential. Looking forward, the cloud will continue to shape the way that businesses approach

their use of computers and the internet in the future.

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