Abstract:

Cloud infrastructure and services are expected to grow significantly in the comi
ng years, therefore making it critical for systems to effectively implement and
maintain cloud technologies. Cloud computing is a paradigm where tasks are assig
ned to a combination of connections, software and services accessed over a netwo
rk. Clouds provide processing power, which is made possible though distributed,
large-scale computing systems, which use virtualization software, e.g. Xen, VMWa
re, Citrix and KVM. Cloud computing can be seen as a traditional desktop computi
ng model, where the resources of a single desktop, computer are used to complete
tasks, and an expansion of the client/server model. The advances in processors,
virtualization technology, disk storage, broadband Internet access and fast, se
rvers have all combined to make cloud computing a compelling paradigm. Customers
can use open source Cloud Computing or commercial systems. Customers are billed
, based upon server utlilisation, processing power and the bandwidth consumed. A
s a result, cloud computing has the potential to change the software industry en
tirely, as applications are purchased, licensed and run over the network instead
of a user s desktop. This change will put data centres and their administrators a
t the centre of the distributed network, as processing power, electricity, bandw
idth and storage are all managed remotely. Cloud computing relies on a cloud pla
tform that lets applications run and use services provided.
Cloud foundations provide the basic local functions an application needs. These
can include an underlying operating system and local support. Yet cloud platform
s provide these functions that differs from what were used on Operating Systems.
From a platform point of view, an operating system provides a set of basic inte
rfaces for applications to use. One of the most well known examples, of an oper
ating system in the cloud today is Amazon s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). EC2 provi
des customer-specific Linux instances running in virtual machines (VMs). From a
technical perspective, it might be more accurate to think of EC2 as a platform f
or VMs rather than operating systems. A cloud local support systems, which inclu
des its own storage, and it hides whatever the underlying operating system might
be. A developer chooses to build a particular local support option that must ac
cept the limitations it imposes. There are good reasons for these limitations, o
f course. It makes cloud computing attractive, as it provides scalability, makes
an application built on a cloud framework, it also handle Internet-size loads.
By making the local support functions more specialised, a cloud platform provide
r has more freedom to optimise the application environment. Accordingly, each se
t of local support functions in cloud foundations today focuses on supporting a
particular kind of application.
The Benefits of Cloud Computing include:
* The use IT resources are provided as a service,
* Compute, storage, databases, queues,
* Clouds leverage economies of scale of commodity hardware,
* Cheap storage, high bandwidth networks and multi-core processors,
* Geographically distributed data centres,
* Cost and management,
* Economies of scale, out-sourced resource management,
* On demand provisioning, co-located data and compute,
* Reliability, Fault tolerance, redundant, and shared resources