Cloud Computing - An Exploration

Charles D. Gnanesh
VP-Technology, SRA Systems
100, Valluvarkottam High Road,
Chennai - 600034, India

Abstract: It is my earnest desire that everyone should have a basic

understanding of what cloud computing is and what it offers to everyone. This
paper attempts to put together a fundamental understanding of what is cloud
computing in simple layman terms. Wherever necessary, the usual jargons
associated with the new domain have been deliberately avoided, to ensure
everyone has a good read and is able to comprehend the basics. For any further
study on the domain or focus topics such as Amazon’s AWS or Microsoft’s Azure
cloud platforms please approach the author.

Contents

Introduction
What is Cloud Computing
Types of Clouds
Advantages of using the cloud
Issues to be addressed by the cloud
Conclusion
References

Cloud Computing – An Exploration 1 Charles D. Gnanesh

Introduction

Over the past 6 months, it’s been an exciting journey attending many seminars,
reading whitepapers and watching success stories on cloud computing. Cloud
Computing has arrived and is here to stay, definitely for the next decade. This
paper will serve as a primer to whoever is interested to dive into this new service
paradigm and is also looking for avenues to expand his/her knowledge in this
area a bit more.

Hospitality has been a lifeline in many of our families in India. Every other day we
get guests from various known/unknown sources of our relations/friends etc and
it’s been our sincere and cherished tradition to feed them
with our best. But over the past few years a new trend has
come up, if the guests arrive at a volume more than 5, we
usually order food at our local fast food shop or our well
known food bhavans. We are no longer concerned about
how much of food we need to prepare, how much rice to
buy, how many dishes to make, when to cook, when to
microwave and so on…. its all outsourced! Cloud
computing attempts to solve the very same problems, but
in a virtual world, with the option to pay as per our usage, scale when required,
get more computing power on a need basis and so many such facilities, all at a
low cost, compared to having our own setup.

Cloud, usually refers to the Internet and in our case, refers to any hardware or
software resource that does not reside on our own infrastructure or premises, but
at a location which is deemed to be safe and available at all times for our use.
Computing is added along with Cloud to imply that the primary aim of the
providers of these clouds, is computing power at a low cost. Lets explore this
further.

Cloud Computing – An Exploration 2 Charles D. Gnanesh

What is Cloud Computing?

In 2006, post the dot-com bubble, Amazon came out with a concept of Elastic
Compute Cloud (EC2), offering everyone, who had a credit card, incredible
amounts of computing power, storage space and software resources, which until
then was being obtained at huge costs. They could do this, because they already
had huge data centers with millions of commodity type servers to support their
cyber bookstore. They quickly started building more such clouds in various parts
of the world and came out with valuable combinations of these resources as
offerings for the industry.

There are thousands of such data centers with unused or underutilized

computing power, which can be sold to users who really are looking for such high
capacities for economies of scale. That was the beginning of the cloud-
computing story. Following Amazon, Internet giant Google also joined in, to get
this market booming.

“Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often

virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet” says Wikipedia.
Just to make it legible to a normal mind, Cloud computing offers an endless
supply of computing power, along with storage space, as long as you can pay for
it and all this would be provided over an internet connection. And this computing
power that you get, may be from a server that shares its resources with many
other users like you, so as to completely utilize the entire power its got. This is
primarily known as virtualization of the physical resources. Some of the attributes
of Cloud computing is depicted below, as given by the Gartner Research Group.

Cloud Computing – An Exploration 3 Charles D. Gnanesh

Types of Clouds

Public Cloud – A service provider, who maintains huge data centers, will
provision computing resources for our usage and we will pay him on a pay-per-
use basis. We will not care about where the systems are located, nor have
physical access or control over where our data is stored. This is an offsite model
of the cloud.

Private Cloud – A huge enterprise can consolidate its servers into a local data
center and employ virtualization techniques to provision machines and storage
space as required by the enterprise. Or if the enterprise wishes, they can also
approach a provider to offer them a cloud, which is accessible only by them and
would be part of their own network, thereby allowing the enterprise to manage
the cloud and its security/access points. The machines provisioned by the cloud
service provider, in this case, will be only used for this particular enterprise and
will not be shared or accessible to the public.

Hybrid Cloud – Having a combination of an in-house cloud and also a tie up with
multiple cloud service providers can offer the enterprise with having a more
secure, vendor independent cloud, commonly referred to as a hybrid cloud. This
will not lock the enterprise to one particular service provider but enable them to
take advantage of the multiple offerings from various providers, while building a
solid cloud for the enterprise.

Cloud Computing – An Exploration 4 Charles D. Gnanesh

Community Clouds – Google Gov Cloud is a good example of a community
cloud, where several organizations come together to offer their resources in
order to establish a service for a community cause. Since the users are less in
this type of a cloud, the cost of using this cloud is usually higher than that of the
public clouds.

Advantages of using the cloud

Scalability – You can expect to have more virtual PC’s to be added for your
usage in a matter of seconds (120 secs to bring up another XP/Linux machine).
Imaging a scenario when you have to ramp up a team with 30-40 people but
need to do this in a couple of days or lose the project. Cloud computing will solve
this problem, all you need to do is place a request for 30-40 virtual machines and
they will all be available for you in a couple of hours maximum. That is called
elastic or dynamic or on-demand scaling, which was not economically or
chronologically feasible before.

Cost effective – A perfect example that is always used to prove the cost
effectiveness of cloud computing is about an online greeting card company
handling valentine’s day traffic. They will expect almost 400 times the traffic to
their sites on Valentine’s Day, than on most of the days in the year. So do they
plan and procure infrastructure for peak performance or ramp up before
Valentine’s day and ramp down again after its over? Cloud computing solves this
problem in a jiffy, they can order extra servers as the traffic grows on valentine’s
day and still be back to normal the next day by asking the provider to take off
those machines that they ordered on valentine’s day. Its all virtual, so it will be
ordered and removed in a click, thus saving huge costs to the company and also
helping them service high traffic on a particular day, making them enjoy higher
profits for that day.

Reliability – Most of the cloud-computing providers have redundancy built in to all

of their storage services. So anything you store will be durable and available for
operations at all times guaranteed. This will save our efforts on Disaster

Cloud Computing – An Exploration 5 Charles D. Gnanesh

recovery, backup etc. Amazon claims all data would be durable 99.999999% in a
given year, meaning it’s very unlikely that you will lose your data unless it’s the
end of the world!

Multi-tenancy – Server consolidation can happen in any enterprise by using multi

tenancy and virtualization of the resources available on servers, thus enabling a
pool of users to use the servers and utilize its computing power to the maximum.
This will also improve centralization of servers and thereby a reduction on the
real estate and electricity consumption.

Maintenance – Users no longer need to upgrade/install service packs, antivirus

on their systems, since the cloud provider will take care of upgrading and
maintaining the machines with the latest available OS patch or security measure.
This will decrease to a great extent the required number of IT personal in any
enterprise to a bare minimum, as everything will be managed in the cloud itself
and not on a per user or per machine basis.

Many of the advantages of a Cloud circulate around the reduction of initial

expenditure incurred for setting up the infrastructure (CAPEX) and in economies
of scale with minimal cost.

Issues to be addressed by the cloud

Security – Everyone is concerned about security of their data in the cloud. For ex,
the data pertaining to an enterprise could be residing in different servers located
across different countries that are governed by their own laws. Here are a few
issues with the security of data on a cloud

1. How does one ensure physical access is restricted if the data does not
reside on a server on our premises, but is somewhere in the world that we
don’t even know?

2. What is the guarantee that the data is not being copied without proper
authentication from the actual owner of the data?

Cloud Computing – An Exploration 6 Charles D. Gnanesh

 3. What is the proof for deletion of the data once the contract is over with the
said provider?

Amazon has come out with an excellent white paper1 on addressing these
concerns and how Amazon is tackling the security issues for their customers.

Availability and Performance – Since our entire business will now rest upon the
service provider to ensure 100% availability, what are the various methods by
which he would ensure we are live always? What if there is a breach or a
shutdown; will they bring up our business sites from a different data center?

Legal Contractual issues – Ownership of the computed data, managing the IPR
are some of the legal and contractual issues that need to be sorted out between
the provider and the enterprise. Working out of different countries will also pose
more legal issues w.r.t to the data storage and physical access.

Conclusion

The majority of technology experts expect that by 2020 most people will access
software applications online and share and access information through the use of
remote server networks, rather than depending primarily on tools and information
housed on their individual, personal computers. This was concluded in a survey
on Internet usage by pewresearch center. They say that cloud computing will
become more dominant than the desktop in the next decade. In other words,
most users will perform most computing and communicating activities through
connections to servers operated by outside firms.

Among the most popular cloud services now are

Social networking sites (Facebook is in the cloud),

Webmail services like Gmail and Yahoo mail,

Microblogging and blogging services such as Twitter and WordPress,

Video-sharing sites like YouTube,

Picture-sharing sites such as Flickr,

Cloud Computing – An Exploration 7 Charles D. Gnanesh

 Document and applications sites like Google Docs,

Social-bookmarking sites like Delicious,

Business sites like eBay,

Ranking, rating and commenting sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor.

This does not mean, however, that most of these experts think the desktop
computer will disappear soon. The majority sees a hybrid life in the next decade,
as some computing functions move towards the cloud and others remain based
on personal computers.

References

1. Frost.com
2. Amazon
3. PewResearch
4. Virtualization for Dummies – Bernard Golden
5. 1AWS – Overview of Security Process White paper by C.Moses of
Amazon
6. Open Source and Cloud Computing – A White paper from Sun
Microsystems

Cloud Computing – An Exploration 8 Charles D. Gnanesh