Essay about Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is an emerging technology. With its huge demand, it is rapidly growing. Cloud computing is defined as "a type of Internet-based computing", where different services such as servers, storage and applications are delivered to an organization’s technological infrastructure through the Internet.

Cloud computing offers services to users based on on-demand self-service, broad network access, measured service, resource pooling and rapid elasticity; These characteristics promise a faster time for implementation, lower cost, superior scalability and a better end user satisfaction. These services are delivered in models known as Software As A service (SaaS), Platform As A Service (PAAS), and Infrastructure As A Service (IAAS). The first layer which is the Software As A service (SaaS) is the layer in which software applications are delivered to end users. Below is the Platform As A Service (PAAS) layer which offers a platform on which applications can be developed. The lowest layer is the Infrastructure As A Service (IAAS) layer, in this layer the physical servers and network infrastructure is offered as a service. These services can be deployed throughout the internet (Public Cloud Computing), on the intranet infrastructure, (Private Cloud Computing), in a shared community of private networks (Community Cloud Computing), or a hybrid of both (Hybrid Cloud Computing). The service deployment models are [8]:

First, Amazon is a pioneer and market leader in area of infrastructure-as-a-Service. Amazon suite of products in cloud computing space is called Amazon web services. This company offers 3S (Simple Storage Service), SimpleDB (Non-relationship database) and EC2 (Computing servers). In other words, Amazon provides a board set of compute, database, data storage, data transfer, analytics, applications and deployment services with faster process, lower IT costs and scale applications. However, all products provided by Amazon are charged.

Cloud computing, in its most basic form, is “using computer services [such as computer and data storage, management and processing] that are delivered over a network” (Kim & Solomon, 2013, p. 189). For example, an organization may require a great deal of storage for their data but may not want to purchase the servers, the physical space for the servers, or the personnel to manage the infrastructure. Instead, they take advantage of the many cloud computing options and outsource their needs, hiring someone to do everything off-site usually with the goal of reducing their overall cost of ownership. As defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), cloud computing has five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models (Mell & Grance, 2011) which will be covered, briefly, in the next few sections.

IaaS is considered one of the most flexible type of delivery model because it offers a good level of freedom, comparable to a local architecture, as the user has a free choice of what type of technology to use in every VM. The drawback is that the instances need to be configured and managed.

At a minimum, IaaS public cloud services offer storage and compute services on a pay-per-use model. But the full array of public cloud providers services offered by all major is mind blowing. Virtual private networks, Highly scalable databases, big data analytics, machine learning , developer tools, application monitoring etc. Amazon Web Services was the first IaaS provider, followed by Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and IBM Cloud.

Cloud computing is the growing method of computing adopted by many organizations nowadays around the world. The word ‘cloud’ refers to the network, the servers providing the cloud services can be located anywhere in the world (Garg & Buyya, 2012). The services are provided through internet and made available to the end users. Several definitions are given for the cloud computing in the literature. According to (Mell & Grance, 2011), “Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This Cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.” Different advantages of having cloud computing includes, services are available on demand, the users have to pay only as per the use and the services are accessible from anywhere as it is available over network. There are different service models and deployment models available for cloud computing.

The three deliver methods of cloud computing/storage is software as a service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The service provides on-demand pay per use and is independent of a platform.

In the last few decades, the increased capability and accessibility of Internet had resulted in many benefits to the world of computing. One of the most prominent contribution t to power cloud computing. Cloud computing, a relatively new technology, has experienced tremendous growth since its inception, with organizations and individual finding it beneficial, due to its convenience and ability to deliver computing resources at cost effective terms. The cloud offers on-demand cloud computing resources, eliminating the need for organizations to purchase, install, store and maintain costly computing infrastructure. It also offers reliability and flexibility in terms of computing. With the cloud model, users can have services in three paradigms. First, cloud as an infrastructure offers the users on-demand computing infrastructure, including

The technology used in Cloud Computing is often centralized on demand and can be offered in terms of services. Just like most internet service providers, the cloud services provide platforms for their clients to create web services (applications) on the internet. These applications are accessed through the web opposed to running off your local hard drive. Cloud computing enables its users to conveniently use various resources like storage, servers, and applications that can be launched with minimal effort. In common terms, cloud computing proposes three types of services: 1) SaaS: Software as a service, 2) PaaS: Platform as a service, and 3) IaaS: Infrastructure as a service. Cloud

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction[NIST].

3.3 Community Cloud-It allows system and services to be accessible to a group of organisation.

We can conclude from cloud computing that it is a significant technology which can be utilized nowadays and in the coming future to make everything easy. The project is to provide a web service using cloud computing, there are many web services, but all the web services need a platform to run on it which in this case is the virtual machine on cloud server. This will help users to access their data from any device or machine instead of using hard drives. My target in this project is to prove that cloud can be used for different kind of applications and purposes. An example of cloud web services is enabling the user to create a virtual machine on the cloud server of the web service provider. A virtual machine can be created and customized by the web service

“Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous , convenient , on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (eg, networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned release with minimal management effort or services provider interaction” [1]

Over the years, computing concepts changing from distributed to parallel to grid to cloud computing. The evolution of computing is shown in Figure 1. Now a day, people choose cloud computing because of the advantages they get from cloud computing. The advantages are scalability, reduced management efforts, on-demand resource allocation and flexible pricing model (pay-as-you-go). Cloud computing has three service models: Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). The basic concept of cloud computing and services is shown in Figure 2. Example of application or services using cloud computing are Microsoft OfficeLive, Dropbox, CluodNumbers, Google AppEngine, SalesForce