Chapter 1

Introduction to Cloud Computing

Paradigms

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Introduction to Cloud Computing Paradigms
• Cloud computing is sprawling the IT landscape. Driven by several converg­ing and
complementary factors, cloud computing is advancing as a viable IT service
delivery model at an incredible pace.
• It has caused a paradigm shift in how we deliver, use, and harness the variety of
IT services it offers. It also offers several benefits compared to traditional on-
premise comput­ing models, including reduced costs and increased agility and
flexibility.
• Its transformational potential is huge and impressive, and consequently cloud
computing is being adopted by individual users, businesses, educational
institutions, governments, and community organizations.
• It helps close the digital (information) divide. It might even help save our planet
by providing an overall greener computing environment.
• Cloud computing is receiving considerable interest among several stakeholders—
businesses, the IT industry, application developers, IT administrators and
managers, researchers, and students who aspire to be successful IT professionals.2
Introduction to Cloud Computing Paradigms
• Cloud computing is here to stay, and its adoption will be widespread. It will
transform not only the IT industry but also every sector of society.
• A wide range of people—application developers, enterprise IT architects and
administrators, and future IT professionals and managers—will need to learn
about cloud computing and how it can be deployed for a variety of applications.
• The growing popularity of the Internet and the Web, along with the availability of
powerful handheld computing, mobile, and sensing devices, are changing the
way we interact, manage our lives, conduct business, and access or deliver
services.
• The lowering costs of computation and communication are driving the focus from
personal to datacenter-centric computing. Although parallel and distributed
computing has been around for several years, its new forms, multicore and cloud
computing, have brought about a sweeping change in the industry.
• These trends are pushing the industry focus from developing applications for PCs
to cloud datacenters that enable millions of users to use software simultaneously.3
Introduction to Cloud Computing Paradigms
• Cloud computing has become one of the buzzwords in the IT industry.
Several IT vendors are promising to offer storage, computation, and
application hosting services and to provide coverage on several
continents, offering service-level agreements-backed performance
and uptime promises for their services.
• They offer subscription-based access to infrastructure, platforms, and
applications that are popularly termed Infrastructure-as-a-Service
(IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
• These emerging services have reduced the cost of computation and
application hosting by several orders of magnitude, but there is
significant complexity involved in the development and delivery of
applications and their services in a seamless, scalable, and reliable
manner.
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Introduction to Cloud Computing Paradigms
• Computing is being transformed into a model consisting of services that are
commoditized and delivered in a manner similar to utilities such as water,
electricity, gas, and telephony. In such a model, users access services based
on their requirements, regardless of where the services are hosted.
• It is based on the concept of dynamic provisioning, which is applied not
only to services but also to compute capability, storage, networking, and
information technology (IT) infrastructure in general.
• Resources are made available through the Internet and offered on a pay-
per-use basis from cloud computing vendors.
• Today, anyone with a credit card can subscribe to cloud services and deploy
and configure servers for an application in hours, growing and shrinking the
infrastructure serving its application according to the demand, and paying
only for the time these resources have been used.
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Introduction to Cloud Computing Paradigms
• Technologies such as cluster, grid, and now, cloud computing, have all aimed at
allowing access to large amounts of computing power in a fully virtualized
manner, by aggregating resources and offering a single system view.
• In addition, an important aim of these technologies has been delivering
computing as a utility. Utility computing describes a business model for on-
demand delivery of computing power; consumers pay providers based on usage
(“payas-you-go”), similar to the way in which we currently obtain services from
traditional public utility services such as water, electricity, gas, and telephony.
• Cloud computing has been coined as an umbrella term to describe a category of
sophisticated on-demand computing services initially offered by commercial
providers, such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. It denotes a model on which a
computing infrastructure is viewed as a “cloud,” from which businesses and
individuals access applications from anywhere in the world on demand [2].
• The main principle behind this model is offering computing, storage, and
software “as a service.” 6
Cloud computing at a glance

• In 1969, Leonard Kleinrock, one of the chief scientists of the original Advanced
Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), which seeded the Internet, said: As
of now, computer networks are still in their infancy, but as they grow up and become
sophisticated, we will probably see the spread of ‘computer utilities’ which, like
present electric and telephone utilities, will service individual homes and offices
across the country.
• This vision of computing utilities based on a service-provisioning model anticipated
the massive transformation of the entire computing industry in the 21st century,
where by computing services will be readily available on demand, just as other utility
services such as water, electricity, telephone, and gas are available in today’s society.
• Similarly, users (consumers) need to pay providers only when they access the
computing services. In addition, consumers no longer need to invest heavily or
encounter difficulties in building and maintaining complex IT infrastructure. In such a
model, users access services based on their requirements without regard to where
the services are hosted.
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Defining a cloud

• Cloud computing has become a popular buzzword; it has been widely used to refer to different technologies,
services, and concepts. It is often associated with virtualized infrastructure or hardware on demand, utility
computing, IT outsourcing, platform and software as a service, and many other things that now are the focus
of the IT industry.
• Figure 1.1 depicts the plethora of different notions included in current definitions of cloud computing.
• The term cloud has historically been used in the telecommunications industry as an abstraction of the
network in system diagrams. It then became the symbol of the most popular computer network: the
Internet.
• This meaning also applies to cloud computing, which refers to an Internet-centric way of computing. The
Internet plays a fundamental role in cloud computing, since it represents either the medium or the platform
through which many cloud computing services are delivered and made accessible.
• NIST Definition of Cloud Computing
• The formal definition of cloud computing comes from the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST):
• “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, 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 is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment
models. 8
Defining a cloud

9
A closer look

• Cloud computing is helping enterprises, governments, public and private institutions, and research
organizations shape more effective and demand-driven computing systems. Access to,as well as
integration of, cloud computing resources and systems is now as easy as performing a credit card
transaction over the Internet. Practical examples of such systems exist across all market segments:
• Large enterprises can offload some of their activities to cloud-based systems. Recently, the New
York Times has converted its digital library of past editions into a Web-friendly format. This
required a considerable amount of computing power for a short period of time. By renting Amazon
EC2 and S3 Cloud resources, the Times performed this task in 36 hours and relinquished these
resources, with no additional costs.
• Small enterprises and start-ups can afford to translate their ideas into business results more
quickly, without excessive up-front costs. Animoto is a company that creates videos out of images,
music, and video fragments submitted by users. The process involves a considerable amount of
storage and backend processing required for producing the video, which is finally made available to
the user.
• Animoto does not own a single server and bases its computing infrastructure entirely on Amazon
Web Services, which are sized on demand according to the overall workload to be processed. Such
workload can vary a lot and require instant scalability.
• 3 Up-front investment is clearly not an effective solution for many companies, and cloud
computing systems become an appropriate alternative. 10
A closer look
• System developers can concentrate on the business logic rather than
dealing with the complexity of infrastructure management and scalability.
Little Fluffy Toys is a company in London that has developed a widget
providing users with information about nearby bicycle rental services.
The company has managed to back the widget’s computing needs on
Google AppEngine and be on the market in only one week.
• End users can have their documents accessible from everywhere and any
device. Apple iCloud is a service that allows users to have their
documents stored in the Cloud and access them from any device users
connect to it.
• This makes it possible to take a picture while traveling with a
smartphone, go back home and edit the same picture on your laptop,
and have it show as updated on your tablet computer. This process is
completely transparent to the user, who does not have to setup cables
and connect these devices with each other. 11
The cloud computing reference model

• A fundamental characteristic of cloud computing is the capability to

deliver, on demand, a variety of IT services that are quite diverse from
each other.
• This variety creates different perceptions of what cloud computing is
among users.
• Despite this lack of uniformity, it is possible to classify cloud computing
services offerings into three major categories: Infrastructure-as-a-
Service(IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service(PaaS), and Software-as-a-
Service(SaaS).
• These categories are related to each other as described in Figure 1.2,
which provides an organic view of cloud computing. We refer to this
diagram as the Cloud Computing Reference Model, and we will use it
throughout.
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The cloud computing reference model

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 Characteristics and benefits

• Cloud computing has some interesting characteristics that bring

benefits to both cloud service consumers (CSCs) and cloud service
providers (CSPs). These characteristics are:
• No up-front commitments
• On-demand access
• Nice pricing
• Simplified application acceleration and scalability
• Efficient resource allocation
• Energy efficiency
• Seamless creation and use of third-party services

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Characteristics and benefits

• The most evident benefit from the use of cloud computing systems and technologies is the
increased economical return due to the reduced maintenance costs and operational costs related
to IT software and infrastructure.
• This is mainly because IT assets, namely software and infrastructure, are turned into utility costs,
which are paid for as long as they are used, not paid for upfront. Capital costs are costs associated
with assets that need to be paid in advance to start a business activity.
• Before cloud computing, IT infrastructure and software generated capital costs, since they were
paid upfront so that business start-ups could afford a computing infrastructure, enabling the
business activities of the organization.
• Cloud computing transforms IT infrastructure and software into utilities, thus significantly
contributing to increasing a company’s net gain.
• Moreover, cloud computing also provides an opportunity for small organizations and start-ups:
these do not need large investments to start their business, but they can comfortably grow with
it.
• Finally, maintenance costs are significantly reduced: by renting the infrastructure and the
application services, organizations are no longer responsible for their maintenance. This task is
the responsibility of the cloud service provider, who, thanks to economies of scale, can bear the
maintenance costs. 15
Characteristics and benefits

• Increased agility in defining and structuring software systems is another

significant benefit of cloud computing. Since organizations rent IT
services, they can more dynamically and flexibly compose their software
systems, without being constrained by capital costs for IT assets.
• There is a reduced need for capacity planning, since cloud computing
allows organizations to react to unplanned surges in demand quite
rapidly.
• End users can benefit from cloud computing by having their data and
the capability of operating on it always available, from anywhere, at any
time, and through multiple devices.
• Information and services stored in the cloud are exposed to users by
Web-based interfaces that make them accessible from portable devices
as well as desktops at home. 16