Cloud Computing

Introduction

The name Cloud Computing was inspired by the cloud-symbol that is often used to represent the Internet inflow charts and diagrams.

Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. These services are broadly divided into three categories: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). 

Cloud - Types and Description

A cloud can be private or public. A public cloud sells services to anyone on the Internet.A private cloud is a proprietary network or a data center that supplies hosted services to a limited number of people.

Another concept that I will like to share in this case is virtual private cloud.When a service provider uses public cloud resources to create their private cloud, the result is called a virtual private cloud. In spite of  diversity in the types of clouds and their diversified characteristics, the goal of cloud computing is to provide easy, scalable access to computing resources and IT services.

Pioneers in cloud computing

Currently, Amazon Web Services is the largest public cloud provider.Infrastructure-as-a-Service like Amazon Web Services provides virtual server instances with unique IP addresses and blocks of storage on demand.

Google is not lacking in this field. GoogleApps are examples of PaaS. Platform-as-a-service in the cloud is defined as a set of software and product development tools hosted on the provider's infrastructure.

In the software-as-a-service cloud model, the vendor supplies the hardware infrastructure, the software product and interacts with the user through a front-end portal. Services may vary from Web-based email to inventory control and database processing.

Cloud Computing Vs. Grid Computing

I look at why cloud computing may be advantageous over grid computing, what issues to consider in both, and some security concerns. I use Amazon Web Services as an example.

To get cloud computing to work, you need three things: thin clients (or clients with a thick-thin switch), grid computing, and utility computing. Grid computing links disparate computers to form one large infrastructure, harnessing unused resources. Utility computing is paying for what you use on shared servers like you pay for a public utility (such as electricity, gas, and so on).

With EC2,customers create their own Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) containing an operating system, applications, and data, and they control how many instances of each AMI run at any given time. Customers pay for the instance-hours (and bandwidth) they use, adding computing resources at peak times and removing them when they are no longer needed. The EC2, Simple Storage Service (S3), and other Amazon offerings scale up to deliver services over the Internet in massive capacities to millions of users.

Cloud computing and grid computing are scalable. Scalability is accomplished through load balancing of application instances running separately on a variety of operating systems and connected through Web services.

Both computing types involve multitenancy and multitask, meaning that many customers can perform different tasks, accessing a single or multiple application instances. Sharing resources among a large pool of users assists in reducing infrastructure costsThe Amazon S3 provides a Web services interface for the storage and retrieval of data in the cloud. Setting a maximum limits the number of objects you can store in S3. You can store an object as small as 1 byte and as large as 5 GB or even several terabytes. S3 uses the concept of buckets as containers for each storage location of your objects. The data is stored securely using the same data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses for its e-commerce Web sites

Security Issues

In February 2008, Amazon's S3 and EC2 suffered a three-hour outage. Even though an SLA provides data recovery and service credits for this type of outage, consumers missed sales opportunities and executives were cut off from critical business information they needed during the outage.

Instead of waiting for an outage to occur, consumers should do security testing on their own—checking how well a vendor can recover data.

An area of security testing is to test a trusted algorithm to encrypt the data on your local computer, and then try to access data on a remote server in the cloud using the decryption keys

Another issue is the potential for problems with data in the cloud. To protect the data, you may want to manage your own private keys. Check with the vendor on the private key management.

Conclusion

As the age of mankind is growing the experience with technological challenges are getting complicated... Complicated and typical necessity of mankind perhaps is nurturing new technologies. It is obvious that the topic of interest will get more advanced in recent future, till then the I wish my very little knowledge in this field will get others attention and correction if I m missing any conception. I would highly appreciate any further discussion or cross communication in this regard.