Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Cloud Computing

It's been long time since the last update in my blog. There are several reasons for not updating this as I changed the company and there is no access to blogs from that company.

I would like to take this opportunity to publish a new article on Cloud Computing as this is the hot technology in today's market.

Many companies or most of the people talk about cloud, cloud, cloud....what is this all about? There were so many jargons, services in cloud like SaaS, PaaS, IaaS etc., Below article should educate about all these things. Hope this will be helpful!

Cloud Computing: Is a style of computing over internet where shared servers provide resources, software and data to computers/other devices on demand

Cloud Services
  • IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) – Is the delivery of computer architecture over internet. It involves the use of remote computers (operating systems, database, middleware, applications) and storage
  • SaaS (Software as a Service) – Is the delivery of Applications (e.g., CRM or ERP) as a service to end users over internet through browsers
  • PaaS (Platform as a Service) – Is the delivery of Application development and deployment platform(e.g., Pega) as a service to developers over internet through browsers, who use the platform to build, deploy and manage SaaS applications

Cloud Types

  • Private cloud is also called internal or corporate cloud, which provides hosted services to a limited number of people behind firewall
  • Public cloud is also called external cloud, where resources are dynamically provisioned on a self-service basis over internet

Security

  • Security on physical, virtual and cloud environments
  • Roles/User management for authentication and authorization
  • Firewall settings to control network access between group of instances
  • Virtual private cloud by specifying IP range for the access
  • Backups and Monitoring
  • Logs and Reporting

Availability and Performance

  • Multiple locations - Cloud instances will be hosted/available in multiple locations to ensure high availability
  • Load Balancer – Automatically distributes incoming traffic to multiple cloud instances for fault tolerance and load balancing for higher performance

Cloud Storage

  • Is a model of networked data storage where data is stored in multiple virtual servers rather than being hosted on dedicated server
  • Hosting companies operate large data centers, who virtualizes the resources according to customer requirements and expose them as virtual servers, which customers can manage

Cloud Monitor

  • Is a kind of dashboard that provides monitoring for cloud resources
  • Provides visibility into resource utilization, operational performance including CPU utilizations, disk read/writes and network traffic

Inter Cloud

  • Is an inter connected global “cloud of clouds” and is extension of Internet “network of networks”
  • This is helpful where each cloud can use the computational and storage resources of other clouds

Benefits

  • Cost is greatly reduced as infrastructure is provided by third party
  • No burden of managing IT infrastructure
  • Device and location independence
  • Scalability via dynamic provisioning of resources on a fine-grained, self-service basis
  • Ability to rapidly and in-expensively re-provision technological infrastructure resources
  • Reliability is improved if multiple redundant sites are used
  • Maintenance is easier since they don’t have to be installed on each user’s computer

Providers

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