30-03-2011, 11:30 AM
Cloud infrastructure and services are expected to grow significantly in the coming years, therefore making it critical for systems to effectively implement and maintain cloud technologies. Cloud computing is a paradigm where tasks are assigned to a combination of connections, software and services accessed over a network. Clouds provide processing power, which is made possible though distributed, large-scale computing systems, which use virtualization software, e.g. Xen, VMWare, Citrix and KVM. Cloud computing can be seen as a traditional desktop computing 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, servers 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. As a result, cloud computing has the potential to change the software industry entirely, 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 at the centre of the distributed network, as processing power, electricity, bandwidth and storage are all managed remotely. Cloud computing relies on a cloud platform 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 platforms 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 interfaces for applications to use. One of the most well known examples, of an operating system in the cloud today is Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). EC2 provides 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 for VMs rather than operating systems. A cloud local support systems, which includes 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 accept the limitations it imposes. There are good reasons for these limitations, of 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 provider has more freedom to optimise the application environment. Accordingly, each set 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
Cloud foundations provide the basic local functions an application needs. These can include an underlying operating system and local support. Yet cloud platforms 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 interfaces for applications to use. One of the most well known examples, of an operating system in the cloud today is Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). EC2 provides 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 for VMs rather than operating systems. A cloud local support systems, which includes 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 accept the limitations it imposes. There are good reasons for these limitations, of 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 provider has more freedom to optimise the application environment. Accordingly, each set 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
