Cloud Computing

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is on-demand access, via the internet, to computing

resources—applications, servers (physical servers and virtual servers), data
storage, development tools, networking capabilities, and more—hosted at a
remote data center managed by a cloud services provider (or CSP). The CSP
makes these resources available for a monthly subscription fee or bills them
according to usage.

Compared to traditional on-premises IT, and depending on the cloud

services you select, cloud computing helps do the following:

 Lower IT costs: Cloud lets you offload some or most of the costs
and effort of purchasing, installing, configuring, and managing your
own on-premises infrastructure.
 Improve agility and time-to-value: With cloud, your organization
can start using enterprise applications in minutes, instead of waiting
weeks or months for IT to respond to a request, purchase and
configure supporting hardware, and install software. Cloud also lets
you empower certain users—specifically developers and data
scientists—to help themselves to software and support
infrastructure.
 Scale more easily and cost-effectively: Cloud provides elasticity—
instead of purchasing excess capacity that sits unused during slow
periods, you can scale capacity up and down in response to spikes
and dips in traffic. You can also take advantage of your cloud
provider’s global network to spread your applications closer to users
around the world.
TYPES OF CLOUD COMPUTING

Public Cloud
Some public cloud examples include those offered by Amazon, Microsoft, or
Google. These companies provide both services and infrastructure, which
are shared by all customers. Public clouds typically have massive amounts
of available space, which translates into easy scalability. A public cloud is
often recommended for software development and collaborative projects.
Companies can design their applications to be portable, so that a project
that’s tested in the public cloud can be moved to the private cloud for
production. Most cloud providers package their computing resources as
part of a service. Public cloud examples range from access to a
completely virtualized infrastructure that provides little more than raw
processing power and storage (Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS) to
specialized software programs that are easy to implement and use
(Software as a Service, or SaaS).

Pros & Cons of Public Cloud Services

The great advantage of a public cloud is its versatility and “pay as you go”
structure that allows customers to provision more capacity on demand. Not
only does this make your system scalable, but it does so in a way that
doesn’t require a large capital expenditure. There are significant costs
associated with IT growth from the hardware and space required to
maintenance and staff resources.

On the downside, the essential infrastructure and operating system of the

public cloud remain under full control of the cloud provider. Customers may
continue to use the platform under the terms and conditions laid out by the
provider, but they may have difficulty repatriating their assets if they want
to change providers. Should the provider go out of business or make
significant changes to the platform, customers could be forced to make
significant infrastructure changes on short notice. There’s also the risk of
an unpatched security vulnerability in the cloud architecture exposing
customers to risk.

Private Cloud
Private clouds usually reside behind a firewall and are utilized by a single
organization. A completely on-premises cloud may be the preferred solution
for businesses with very tight regulatory requirements, though private
clouds implemented through a colocation provider are gaining in popularity.
Authorized users can access, utilize, and store data in the private cloud
from anywhere, just like they could with a public cloud. The difference is
that no one else can access or utilize those computing resources.

Pros & Cons of Private Cloud Services

If controlling the environment is essential, as are tight security regulations

because of your industry, private cloud solutions offer both security and
control. The additional control offered by a private cloud makes it easier
to restrict access to valuable assets and ensures that a company will be able
to move its data and applications where it wants, whenever it wants.
Furthermore, since the private cloud isn’t controlled by an outside vendor,
there’s no risk of sudden changes disrupting the company’s entire
infrastructure. A private cloud solution will also not be affected by a public
cloud provider’s system downtime. Still, you do get the technical support
offered by your partner as well as their disaster recovery.

However, the benefits associated with a private cloud come at a cost. The
company that owns the cloud is responsible for both software and
infrastructure, making this a less economical model than the public cloud.
Further, private clouds lack the versatility of public clouds. They can only
be expanded by adding more hardware and storage capacity, making it
difficult to scale operations quickly, or frugally, should the business need
arise.
Hybrid Cloud
Hybrid clouds combine public clouds with private clouds. They are designed
to allow the two platforms to interact seamlessly, with data and applications
moving smoothly from one to the other. It’s the perfect solution for a
business or organization who needs a little bit of both options, usually
dependent upon industry and size.

Pros and Cons of Hybrid Cloud Services

The primary advantage of a hybrid cloud model is its ability to provide the
scalable computing power of a public cloud with the security and control of
a private cloud. Data can be stored safely behind the firewalls and
encryption protocols of the private cloud, then moved securely into a public
cloud environment when needed. This is especially helpful in the age of big
data analytics, when industries like healthcare must adhere to strict data
privacy regulations while also using sophisticated algorithms powered by
artificial intelligence (AI) to derive actionable insights from huge masses of
unstructured data.

Because of the combination of the two cloud models, it can be cost effective,
though the initial expenditure for the private cloud should be considered.
These costs can, in some ways, be recouped later, when scalability and
growth can be handled on the public cloud when that becomes necessary.

Community Cloud
Community clouds are a collaborative, multi-tenant platform used by
several distinct organizations to share the same applications. The users are
typically operating within the same industry or field and share common
concerns in terms of security, compliance, and performance.

In essence, a community cloud is a private cloud that functions much like a

public cloud. The platform itself is managed privately, either in a data
center or on-premises. Authorized users are then segmented within that
environment. These deployments are commonly used by government
agencies, healthcare organizations, financial services firms, and other
professional communities.

Pros & Cons of Community Cloud Services

As with the other models, scalability is a benefit, and at a cost that can be
shared across organizations. Further, because of common security needs,
organizations can rest easy knowing that they’re fully compliant with any
industry regulations and that it’s in the best interest of their “digital”
neighbors to monitor this as well. Similarly, decision making regarding
changes to the systems are collaborative, ensuring, in many ways, that
decisions are made with the best interests of the group.

Even with the shared space, the system remains highly flexible, with
individual organizations able to set access controls and allows the system to
adjust to the demands of an organization, shifting resources if necessary.

While all of these are strengths, unfortunately, they come with a downside
as well. The shared storage and bandwidth can create issues with
prioritization and performance as servers adjust to demands. And, because
the storage space is shared, data security can be a concern. It’s just not
practical for most businesses for a variety of reasons, most of which have to
do with the potential pitfalls.

CHARACTERISTICS OF CLOUD COMPUTING AS PER NIST:

NIST stands for National institute of standards and technology.

According to NIST there are five essential characteristics of cloud
computing:

1. On Demand Self Service

2. Broad network access
3. Resource pooling
4. Rapid elasticity
5. Measured service

1. On Demand Self Service

User gets on demand self-services. User can get computer services like
email, applications etc. without interacting with each service provider.

Some of the cloud service providers are- Amazon Web Service, Microsoft,
IBM, Salesforce.com

2. Broad network access

Cloud services are available over the network and can be accessed through
different clients such as mobile, laptops etc.
3. Resource pooling
Same resources can be used by more than one customer at a same time.

For example- storage, network bandwidth can be used by any number of

customers and without knowing the exact location of that resource.

4. Rapid elasticity
On users demand cloud services can be available and released. Cloud
service capabilities are unlimited and used in any quantity at any time.

5. Measured service
Resources used by the users can be monitored, controlled. This reports is
available for both cloud providers and consumer.
On the basis of this measured reports cloud systems automatically controls
and optimizes the resources based on the type of services - Storage,
processing, bandwidth etc.

EVOLUTION OF CLOUD COMPUTING

Cloud computing is all about renting computing services. This idea first
came in the 1950s. In making cloud computing what it is today, five
technologies played a vital role. These are distributed systems and its
peripherals, virtualization, web 2.0, service orientation, and utility
computing.
 Distributed Systems
It is a composition of multiple independent systems but all of them are
depicted as a single entity to the users. The purpose of distributed
systems is to share resources and also use them effectively and
efficiently. Distributed systems possess characteristics such as
scalability, concurrency, continuous availability, heterogeneity, and
independence in failures. But the main problem with this system was
that all the systems were required to be present at the same
geographical location. Thus to solve this problem, distributed
computing led to three more types of computing and they were-
Mainframe computing, cluster computing, and grid computing.

 Virtualization
It was introduced nearly 40 years back. It refers to the process of
creating a virtual layer over the hardware which allows the user to run
multiple instances simultaneously on the hardware. It is a key
technology used in cloud computing. It is the base on which major cloud
computing services such as Amazon EC2, VMware vCloud, etc work on.
Hardware virtualization is still one of the most common types of
virtualization.

 Web 2.0
It is the interface through which the cloud computing services interact
 with the clients. It is because of Web 2.0 that we have interactive and
dynamic web pages. It also increases flexibility among web pages.
Popular examples of web 2.0 include Google Maps, Facebook, Twitter,
etc. Needless to say, social media is possible because of this technology
only. In gained major popularity in 2004.

 Service orientation
It acts as a reference model for cloud computing. It supports low-cost,
flexible, and evolvable applications. Two important concepts were
introduced in this computing model. These were Quality of Service
(QoS) which also includes the SLA (Service Level Agreement) and
Software as a Service (SaaS).

 Utility computing
It is a computing model that defines service provisioning techniques for
services such as compute services along with other major services such
as storage, infrastructure, etc which are provisioned on a pay-per-use
basis.

PRINCIPLES OF PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING

Parallel Computing
It is the use of multiple processing elements simultaneously for solving any
problem. Problems are broken down into instructions and are solved
concurrently as each resource that has been applied to work is working at
the same time.

Advantages
1. It saves time and money as many resources working together will
reduce the time and cut potential costs.
2. It can be impractical to solve larger problems on Serial Computing.
3. It can take advantage of non-local resources when the local resources
are finite.
4. Serial Computing ‘wastes’ the potential computing power, thus Parallel
Computing makes better work of the hardware.

Types of Parallelism

1. Bit-level parallelism
It is the form of parallel computing which is based on the increasing
processor’s size. It reduces the number of instructions that the system
must execute in order to perform a task on large-sized data.
Example: Consider a scenario where an 8-bit processor must compute
 the sum of two 16-bit integers. It must first sum up the 8 lower-order
bits, then add the 8 higher-order bits, thus requiring two instructions to
perform the operation. A 16-bit processor can perform the operation
with just one instruction.

2. Instruction-level parallelism
A processor can only address less than one instruction for each clock
cycle phase. These instructions can be re-ordered and grouped which
are later on executed concurrently without affecting the result of the
program. This is called instruction-level parallelism.

3. Task Parallelism
Task parallelism employs the decomposition of a task into subtasks and
then allocating each of the subtasks for execution. The processors
perform the execution of sub-tasks concurrently.

4. Data-level parallelism
Instructions from a single stream operate concurrently on several data –
Limited by non-regular data manipulation patterns and by memory
bandwidth

Limitations of Parallel Computing:

 It addresses such as communication and synchronization between
multiple sub-tasks and processes which is difficult to achieve.
 The algorithms must be managed in such a way that they can be
handled in a parallel mechanism.
 The algorithms or programs must have low coupling and high cohesion.
But it’s difficult to create such programs.
 More technically skilled and expert programmers can code a
parallelism-based program well.

Distributed Computing
In distributed computing we have multiple autonomous computers which
seems to the user as single system. In distributed systems there is no
shared memory and computers communicate with each other through
message passing. In distributed computing a single task is divided among
different computers.

Types of Distributed Systems

1. Distributed Computing System:

This distributed system is used in performance computation which

requires high computing.

Cluster Computing: A collection of connected computers that works

together as a unit to perform operations together, functioning in a
single system. Clusters are generally connected quickly via local area
networks & each node is running the same operating system.

When input comes from a client to the main computer, the master CPU
divides the task into simple jobs and send it to slaves note to do it when
the jobs are done by the slave nodes, they send back to the master node,
and then it shows the result to the main computer
Grid computing: In grid computing, the subgroup consists of distributed
systems, which are often set up as a network of computer systems, each
system can belong to a different administrative domain and can differ
greatly in terms of hardware, software, and implementation network
technology.
The different department has a different computer with different OS to
manage the control node is present which help different computer with
different OS to communicate with each other and transfer messages to
work.

2. Distributed Information System:

Distributed transaction processing: It works across different servers

using multiple communication models. The four characteristics that
transactions have:
 Atomic: the transaction taking place must be indivisible for
the others
 Consistent: The transaction should be consistent after the
transaction has been done
 Isolated: A transaction must not interfere with another
transaction
 Durable: Once an engaged transaction, the changes are
permanent. Transactions are often constructed as several sub-
transactions, jointly forming a nested transaction.


Difference between Parallel Computing and Distributed Computing

S.N
O Parallel Computing Distributed Computing
Many operations are performed System components are located at
1. simultaneously different locations
 2. Single computer is required Uses multiple computers

Multiple processors perform Multiple computers perform multiple

3. multiple operations operations

It may have shared or

4. distributed memory It have only distributed memory

Processors communicate with Computer communicate with each other

5. each other through bus through message passing.

Improves the system Improves system scalability, fault

6. performance tolerance and resource sharing capabilities

Elasticity in Cloud

Cloud Elasticity is the property of a cloud to grow or shrink capacity for

CPU, memory, and storage resources to adapt to the changing demands of
an organization. Cloud Elasticity can be automatic, without need to perform
capacity planning in advance of the occasion, or it can be a manual process
where the organization is notified they are running low on resources and
can then decide to add or reduce capacity when needed. Monitoring tools
offered by the cloud provider dynamically adjust the resources allocated to
an organization without impacting existing cloud-based operations.

Example:
Consider an online shopping site whose transaction workload increases
during festive season like Christmas. So for this specific period of time, the
resources need a spike up. In order to handle this kind of situation, we can
go for Cloud-Elasticity service rather than Cloud Scalability. As soon as the
season goes out, the deployed resources can then be requested for
withdrawal.

Benefits of cloud elasticity

Agility: By eliminating the need to purchase, configure, and install new

infrastructure when demand changes, Cloud Elasticity prevents the need to
plan for such unexpected demand spikes, and enables organizations to meet
any unexpected demand.

Pay-as-needed pricing: Rather than paying for infrastructure whether or

not is is being used, Cloud Elasticity enables organizations to pay only for
the resources that are in use at any given point tin time, closely tracking IT
expenditures to the actual demand in real-time.

High Availability: Cloud elasticity facilitates both high availability and

fault tolerance, since VMs or containers can be replicated if they appear to
be failing, helping to ensure that business services are uninterrupted and
that users do not experience downtime. This helps ensure that users
perceive a consistent and predictable experience, even as resources are
provisioned or deprovisioned automatically and without impact on
operations.

Efficiency: As with most automations, the ability to autonomously adjust

cloud resources as needed enables IT staff to shift their focus away from
provisioning and onto projects that are more beneficial to the organization.

Speed/Time-to-market: organizations have access to capacity in minutes

instead of the weeks or months it may take through a traditional
procurement process.

Cloud Scalability:
Cloud scalability is used to handle the growing workload where good
performance is also needed to work efficiently with software or
applications. Scalability is commonly used where the persistent
deployment of resources is required to handle the workload statically.

Cloud Computing Reference Model:

The reference model for cloud computing is an abstract model that

characterizes and standardizes a cloud computing environment by
partitioning it into abstraction layers and cross-layer functions.
Classification of Cloud Computing services:
1. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS),
2. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and
3. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
4. Web 2.0
1. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a cloud computing offering in
which a vendor provides users access to computing resources such as
servers, storage and networking.

2. Platform as a service (PaaS) is a cloud computing offering that

provides users with a cloud environment in which they can develop, manage
and deliver applications.

3. Software as a service (SaaS) is a cloud computing offering that

provides users with access to a vendor’s cloud-based software. Users do not
install applications on their local devices. Instead, the applications reside on
a remote cloud network accessed through the web or an API. Through the
application, users can store and analyze data and collaborate on projects.

4. Web 2.0 is the term used to describe a variety of web sites and
applications that allow anyone to create and share online information or
material they have created. A key element of the technology is that it allows
people to create, share, collaborate & communicate.