COMPUTERS

Unit-iv

What is Cloud?

Ø The term Cloud refers to a Network or Internet. In other words, we can say that Cloud

Is something, which is present at remote location.

Ø Cloud can provide services over network

i.e., on public networks or on private networks, i.e., WAN, LAN or VPN.

Applications such as e-mail, web conferencing, customer relationship

Management (CRM), all run in cloud.

What is cloud computing?

Ø Cloud Computing refers to manipulating, configuring, and accessing the applicationsonline. It offers online data storage, infrastructure and application.

Ø We need not to install a piece of software on our local PC and this is how the cloud computing overcomes platform dependency issues.

Ø Hence, the Cloud Computing is making our business application mobile and

Collaborative.

History of Cloud Computing:-

Ø Concept evolved in 1950 (IBM) called RJE (Remote Job Entry Process)

Ø In 2006 Amazon provided First Public Cloud AWS (Amazon Web Services)

Cloud Components:-

Ø In a simple topological sense a cloud computing solution is made up of several elements

Ø They are three types of cloud components

§ Clients

§ The Data Centers &

§ Distributed Servers

Diagram of Cloud components:

Clients:-

Ø Clients are the devices that the end users interact with to manage their information on the cloud.

Ø They are three types of clients

· Mobile

· Thin

· Thick

Mobile:- includes personal digital assistance or smart phones like a black berry or an iphone.

Thin:- clients are computers that do not have internal hard drives but another let the server do all the work but then display the information.

Thick:- this type of client is a regular computer using a web browser like google chrome or internet explorer to connect to the cloud.

Data Center:-

Ø It is collection of servers where application is placed and is accessed via internet.

Distributed Servers:-

Ø This gives the service provider more flexibility in options and security.

Ø If some thing were to happen at one site causing a failure the service would still be accessed through another side.

Ø Often servers are in geographically different places but server acts as if they are working next to each other.

Infrasturcture of Cloud Computing:-

Ø Cloud infrastructure consists of servers, storage, network, management software, and deployment software and platform virtualization.

HYPERVISOR:-

Ø Hypervisor is a firmware or low-level program that acts as a Virtual Machine Manager. It allows

to share the single physical instance of cloud resources between several tenants.

MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE:-

Ø Management Software helps to maintain and configure the infrastructure.

DEPLOYMENT SOFTWARE:-

Ø Deployment software helps to deploy and integrate the application on the cloud.

NETWORK:-

Ø Network is the key component of cloud infrastructure. It allows to connect cloud services over the Internet. It is also possible to deliver network as a utility over the Internet, i.e., the consumer can customize the network route and protocol.

SERVER:-

Ø Server helps to compute the resource sharing and offer other services such as

resource allocation and deallocation, monitoring resources, security, etc.

STORAGE:-

Ø Cloud uses distributed file system for storage purpose. If one of the storage resources fails, then it can be extracted from another one which makes cloud computing more reliable.

SERVICES MODELS:-

Ø They are three types of services in cloud computing

§ Software as a service (saas) – End Users

§ Plat form as a service (paas) – Application Developers

§ Infrastructure as a service (iass) – Net work Architects

Saas:-

Ø Just run it for me, also known as on-demand services is an application that can be accessed from any where on the world as long as you can have an computer with an internet connection.

Ø We can access this cloud hosted application with out any additional hardware or software.

§ Ex: G-mail,Yahoo-mail.

Ø Also they can provide security features such as ssl encryption a cryptographic protocol.

Pass:-

Ø Give us nice API (Application program interface) and take care of the implementation.

Ø In the paas model, cloud providers deliver a computing platform and/or solutions stack typically including operating systems programming language execution environment,database,and webserver.

Ø Is a platform for developers to write and create their own saas

Ø Which means rapid development at low cost.

§ Ex:- windows,sales force.com,etc.

Iaas:-

Ø Also known as hardware as a service, is a consuming power that you can rent for a limited period of time.

Ø Allows existing applications to be run on a cloud suppliers hardware, cloud provides offer computers as physical or more offten as virtual machines load balancers, and networks.

Architecture of Cloud Computing:-

Ø They are three types of cloud computing Architecture

· Public cloud

· Private cloud

· Hydbird cloud

Public cloud:-

Ø Computing infrasturcture Is hosted by cloud vendor at the vendors premises and can be shared by various organizations.

· Ex:-Amazon,google,microsoft

Diagram of Public cloud:

Private cloud:-

Ø The computing infrasturcture is dedicated to a particular organization and not shared with other organizations.

Ø More expensive and more secure when compare to public cloud.

· EX:-HP data center,IBM,Sun Oracle.

Diagram of Private cloud:

Hybird cloud:-

Ø Organiztions may host critical applications on private clouds where as a relatively less security concerns on public cloud.

Ø Usage of both public and private together is called hybird cloud.

Diagram of hybird cloud:

Applications of Cloud Computing:-

Ø They are two types of Applications of Cloud Computing

§ Storage

§ Database Services

Storage:-

Ø If you lease storage space from a vendor, you are not responsible to buy equipment, pay to run it, and pay to cool it.

Ø That’s all on the vendor,But there are different options when it comes down to cloud storage.

Data Base Services:-

Ø Another “as a service” offering that is becoming prevalent in the world of cloud computing is Database as a Service (DaaS).

Ø The idea behind DaaS is to avoid the complexity and cost of running your own database.

DaaS offers these benefits::-

Ease of use:-

Ø There are no servers to provision and no redundant systems to worry about. You don’t have to worry about buying, installing, and maintaining hardware for the database.

Power:-

Ø The database isn’t housed locally, but that doesn’t mean that it is not functional and effective. Depending on your vendor, you can get custom data validation to ensure accurate information. You can create and manage the database with ease.

Integration:-

Ø The database can be integrated with your other services to provide more value and power. For instance, you can tie it in with calendars, email, and people to make your work more powerful.

Management:-

Ø Because large databases benefit from constant pruning and optimization, typically there are expensive resources dedicated to this task. With some DaaS offerings, this management can be provided as part of the service for much less expense.

Intranets and the Cloud:-

Ø They are two types of Intranets Cloud Computing

§ Components

§ Hypervisor Applications

Hypervisor Applications:-

Ø Hypervisor is a firmware or low-level program that acts as a Virtual Machine Manager

Ø Applications like VMware or Microsoft’s Hyper-V allow you to virtualized your servers so that multiple virtual servers can run on one physical server.

Ø These sorts of solutions provide the tools to supply a virtualized set of hardware to the guest operating system.

Ø They also make it possible to install different operating systems on the same machine.

Types of Hardware Virtualization:-

Here are the three types of hardware virtualization:

1. Full Virtualization

2. Emulation Virtualization

3. Para virtualization

FULL VIRTUALIZATION:-

Ø In Full Virtualization, the underlying hardware is completely simulated. Guest software does not require any modification to run.

EMULATION VIRTUALIZATION:-

Ø In Emulation, the virtual machine simulates the hardware and hence become independent of the it. In this, the guest operating system does not require modification.

PARAVIRTUALIZATION:-

Ø In Para virtualization, the hardware is not simulated. The guest software run their own isolated domains.

Ø VMware vSphere is highly developed infrastructure that offers a management infrastructure framework for virtualization. It virtualizes the system, storage and networking hardware.

First Movers in the Cloud:-

Ø Cloud computing is a growing field, and there will likely be new players in the marketin the foreseeable future. For now, let’s look at the names you already know:

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

Amazon:-

Ø Amazon was one of the first companies to offer cloud services to the public, and they arevery sophisticated. Amazon offers a number of cloud services, including

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2):-

Ø Offers virtual machines and extra CPU cycles foryour organization.

Simple Storage Service (S3):-

Ø Allows you to store items up to 5GB in size inAmazon’s virtual storage service.

Simple Queue Service (SQS):-

Ø Allows your machines to talk to each other usingthis message-passing API.

SimpleDB:-

Ø A web service for running queries on structured data in real time. Thisservice works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (AmazonS3) and Amazon.

Ø Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing theability to store, process, and query data sets in the cloud.

Google:-

Ø In stark contrast to Amazon’s offerings is Google’s App Engine. On Amazon you get rootprivileges, but on App Engine, you can’t write a file in your own directory.

Ø Google removedthe file write feature out of Python as a security measure, and to store data you must useGoogle’s database.

Ø Google offers online documents and spreadsheets, and encourages developers to buildfeatures for those and other online software, using its Google App Engine.

Ø Google reducedthe web applications to a core set of features, and built a good framework for deliveringthem.

Ø Google also offers handy debugging features. Groups and individuals will likely get the most out of App Engine by writing a layer ofPython that sits between the user and the database.

Ø Look for Google to add more features toadd background processing services.

Microsoft:-

Ø Microsoft’s cloud computing solution is called Windows Azure, an operating system thatallows organizations to run Windows applications and store files and data using Microsoft datacenters.

Windows Azure:-

Ø Provides service hosting and management and low-level scalablestorage, computation, and networking.

Microsoft SQL Services:-Provides database services and reporting.

Microsoft .NET Services:-Provides service-based implementations of .NETFramework concepts such as workflow.

Live Services: -Used to share, store, and synchronize documents, photos, and filesacross PCs, phones, PC applications, and web sites.

Microsoft SharePoint Services and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services:-Used forbusiness content, collaboration, and solution development in the cloud.

The Organization and Cloud Computing:-

Ø Whether or not you should use cloud computing depends on a number of factors, including

• Cost/benefit ratio

• Speed of delivery

• How much capacity you will use

• Whether your data is regulated

• Your organization’s corporate and IT structure

Benefits of Cloud Computing:-

Scalability:-

Ø Scaling up an application delivery solution is not that easy as scaling up an application because it involves configuration overhead or even re-architecting the network.

Ø So, application delivery solution is need to be scalable which will require the virtual infrastructure such that resource can be provisioned and de-provisioned easily.

Simplicity:-

Ø Again, not having to buy and configure new equipment allows you and your IT staff to getright to your business.

Ø The cloud solution makes it possible to get your application startedimmediately, and it costs a fraction of what it would cost to implement an on-site solution.

Knowledgeable Vendors:-

Ø Typically, when new technology becomes popular, there are plenty of vendors who pop upto offer their version of that technology.

Ø This isn’t always good, because a lot of thosevendors tend to offer less than useful technology.

Ø By contrast, the first comers to the cloudcomputing party are actually very reputable companies.

Ø Companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Yahoo! have been good vendorsbecause they have offered reliable service, plenty of capacity, and you get some brandfamiliarity with these well-known names.

More Internal Resources:-

Ø By shifting your non-mission-critical data needs to a third party, your IT department isfreed up to work on important, business-related tasks.

Ø You also don’t have to add moreMan power and training that stem from having to deal with these low-level tasks.

SECURITY:-

Ø The mega data center in the cloud should be securely architected. Also the control node, a entry point in mega data center also needs to be secure.

Limitations:-

Protect Your Data:-

Ø That doesn’t mean you can’t maintain your data on a cloud; you just need to be safe.

Ø The best way is to encrypt your data before you send it to a third party. Programs like PGP (www.pgp.com) or open-source True Crypt (www.truecrypt.org) can encrypt the file so that only those with a password can access it.

Ø Encrypting your data before it is sent to the service provider ensures that if the provider’s security measures are breached, your data is still secure.

Applications Not Ready:-

Ø First, the application might require a lot of bandwidth to communicate with users.

Ø The application might also take a lot of effort to integrate with your other applicationsIf you try to relocate it to a cloud.

Developing Your Own Applications:-

Ø Often, the applications you want are already out there. However, it may be the case that you need a very specific application.

Rolling Up Your Sleeves:-

Ø If you have a database on the cloud, you’ll need some sort of customized interface and some knowledge of Structured Query Language (SQL) to access and manage that data.

Ø This is sort of a minor concern, because chances are good that you have programmers on staff who can pound out what you need in no time.

But There Are Benefits:-

Ø The fact of the matter is that putting your database needs on a cloud can be very beneficial, in terms of scalability.

§ Linux An open-source operating system

§ Apache An open-source web server

§ MySQL An open-source Structured Query Language (SQL) relational database forweb servers

§ Perl A programming language

Security concerns:-

Ø As with so many other technical choices, security is a two-sided coin in the world of cloud computing there are pros and there are cons.

Privacy Concerns with a Third Party:-

Ø The first and most obvious concern is for privacy considerations. That is, if another party ishousing all your data, how do you know that it’s safe and secure.

§ Not enough major suppliers yet

§ Regulatory requirements prohibit cloud

§ Bringing back in-house may be difficult

§ Worried on-demand will cost more

§ Not enough ability to customize

§ Hard to integrate with in-house IT

§ Availability

§ Performance

§ Security

Hackers:-

Ø Hackers aren’t the nice people that Hollywood has made them out to be.

Ø Most aren’t just sitting around, drinking Mountain Dew and trying to break into a secure network just because they can.

Ø They want somethingthere’s a lot they can do if they’ve compromised your data.

Ø It ranges from selling your proprietary information to your competition to surreptitiously encrypting your storage until you pay them off.

Bot Attackers:-

Ø In a commonly recognized worst-case scenario, attackers use botnets to perform distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. In order to get the hackers to stop attacking your network, you face blackmail.

Hackers set up systems to send out distributed denial of service attacks,

bringing the service provider to its knees

Centralized Data:-

Ø We’ve talked about the specter of data loss by being in one place.

Ø However, there are some good security traits that come with centralizing your data. Just in practice, you make your system more inherently secure.

Improved Software Security:-

Ø Vendors are likely to develop more efficient security software. Since you’re charged for your CPU cycles, you’re going to notice and squawk if the price is too high.

Ø As such, the vendor doesn’t want to lose your business and is going to be more inclined to develop more efficient security software.

Security Testing:-

Ø SaaS providers don’t bill you for all of the security testing they do. It’s shared among the cloud users.

Ø The end result is that because you are in a pool with others (you never see them, but they are there), you get to realize lower costs for security testing.

Ø This is also the case with PaaS where your developers create their own code, but the cloud code–scanning tools check the code for security weaknesses.

Regulatory Issues:-

Ø It’s rare when we actually want the government in our business. In the case of cloud computing, however, regulation might be exactly what we need.

Ø Without some rules in place, it’s too easy for service providers to be unsecure or even shifty enough to make off with your data.

No Existing Regulation:-

Ø Currently there is no existing regulation, but there should be. In September 2008, the United States government took control of Washington Mutual.

Ø It was viewed as the greatest bank failure in American history to date. It reminds us that no matter how huge a company is, it can still come tumbling down.

Ø Look at a company like Google, for instance. It’s a big one and recently valued at $107 billion.

Ø That size and value would seem to make them bulletproof. But WaMu was worth $307 billion when it failed.

Government to the Rescue:-

Ø Is it the government’s place to regulate cloud computing? As we mentioned, thanks to the Great Depression, we had regulation that protected WaMu’s customers’ money when the bank failed.

Ø There are two schools of thought on the issue. First, if government can figure out a way to safeguard data—either from loss or theft—any company facing such a loss would applaud the regulation.

Who Owns the Data

Ø Eighty percent said they’d be very concerned if a vendor used their photos and other information in marketing campaigns.

Ø Sixty-eight percent said they’d be very concerned if the vendor used their personal information to send them personalized ads.

Ø Sixty-three percent said they’d be very concerned if service providers kept their data after the user deleted it.

Government Procurement:-

Ø There are also questions about whether government agencies will store their data on the cloud. Procurement regulations will have to change for government agencies to be keen on jumping on the cloud.

Ø The General Services Administration is making a push toward cloud computing, in an effort to reduce the amount of energy their computers consume.

Ø Hewlett-Packard and Intel produced a study that shows the federal government spends $480 million per year on electricity to run its computers.

Ø In fact, the GSA is working with a vendor to develop an application that will calculate how much energy government agencies consume.

Cloud Computing Titans:-

Google:-

Ø There doesn’t seem to be a pie that Google doesn’t have their fingers in. The cloud is certainly one of Google’s biggest business ventures, and they offer a couple of tools to help draw customers to their cloud.

Google App Engine:-

Ø Google App Engine enables developers to build their web apps on the same infrastructure that powers Google’s own applications.

EMC:-

Ø But EMC’s reach goes far beyond virtualized datacenter management. Their other fields of expertise include

Archiving :-

Creating accessible online archives that offer a reduced operational costby shrinking backup windows and making restores faster.

Backup and recovery:-

Different tools combine EMC’s recovery managementofferings, backup technologies, and management strategies to ensure that you have a solid backup and recovery practice.

Enterprise content management:-

Content-enabled solutions help mitigate riskwithout imposing overly complex technologies on your organization.

Intelligent information management:-

Using various technologies allows organizations to discover, store, and act on information in intelligent ways.

IT management:-

is simplified and its cost reduced throughautomation, virtualization, and process efficiencies.

Replication:-

Data protection and remote replication technologies provide disasterrecovery options.

Security :-

Organizations can deploy products with capabilities for access control,data protection, and auditing.

NetApp:-

Ø In 1992 they introduced the world’s first networked storage device. The company continues to introduce new technologies that reduce the costs of IT.

Ø NetApp claims they can cut your IT costs in half, use up to 80 percent less storage, hold off on datacenter expansion, and speed up your time to market.

Offerings:-

Ø NetApp was one of the first companies in the cloud, offering datacenter consolidation and storage services, as well as virtualization.

Ø Their products include a platform OS, storage services, storage security, software management, and protection software.

Ø Their solutions run the gamut from Microsoft SQL Server and SharePoint Services to seismic processing and reservoir development to desktop and server virtualization.

Cisco Partnership:

Ø The Cisco Unified Computing System unites compute, network, storage access, and virtualization resources in a cohesive new datacenter architecture.

Ø This allows customers to reduce the complexities often associated with datacenter virtualization, lower costs, and improve asset utilization.

Ø Through Cisco Validated Design, NetApp will provide flexible and powerful storage solutions for the Cisco Unified Computing System that will be tested for interoperability in virtualized datacenter environments.

Microsoft:-

Ø Microsoft offers a number of cloud services for organizations of any size—from enterprises all the way down to mom-and-pop shops or individuals.

Ø A good portion of Microsoft’s cloud offerings are cloud variants of products that people already use, so cloud versions aren’t that difficult to use.

Azure Services Platform:-

Ø The Azure Services Platform supplies a broad range of functionality to build applications to serve individuals or large enterprises, and everyone in between.

Ø The platform offers a cloud operating system and developer tools. Applications can be developed with industry standard protocols like REST and SOAP.

Windows Azure:-

· Add web service capabilities to existing applications

· Build and modify applications and then move them onto the Web

· Make, test, debug, and distribute web services efficiently and inexpensively

· Reduce the costs of IT management

SQL Services:-

Ø Microsoft SQL Services extends SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services. This allows the storage of structured, semi structured, and unstructured data.

Ø SQL Services delivers a set of integrated services that allow relational queries, search, reporting, analytics, integration, and synchronization of data.

Ø This can be done by mobile users, remote offices, or business partners.

NET Services:-

Ø Microsoft .NET Services are a set of Microsoft-hosted, developer-oriented services that provide the components required by many cloud-based and cloud-aware applications.

Live Services:-

Ø Live Services is a development center and supplier of software development kits for Windows Live and Azure Services platforms.

Ø It gives information about getting started with Windows Live services, current documentation and APIs, and samples

Exchange Online:-

· Built-in business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities

· Scheduled uptime of 99.9 percent with financially backed service level agreements

· Use of HTTPS to help keep Internet access secure

· Tier 2 support 24/7 (web form and phone based) for IT administrators

· Sign-In Tool for single sign-on capability

· Directory Synchronization Tool to help keep on-premise and online Active Directories in sync

SharePoint Services:-

Ø SharePoint sites are made up of Web Parts and Windows ASP.NET-based components.

Ø Web Parts are designed to be add-ons to web pages and configured by site administrators and users to create complete page-based applications.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM:-

Ø Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is an on-demand customer relationship management service hosted and managed by Microsoft.

Ø The Internet service delivers a full suite of marketing, sales, and service capabilities through a web browser or directly into Microsoft Office and Outlook.

Ø It provides “instant-on” access to businesses that want a full-featured CRM solution with no IT infrastructure investment or setup required.

Amazon:-

Ø Amazon may be the most widely known cloud vendor. They offer services on many different fronts, from storage to platform to databases.

Ø Amazon seems to have their finger in a number of cloud technologies

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2):-

Ø Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that offers resizable compute capacity in the cloud and is designed to make web scaling easier for developers.

Ø For instance, Amazon EC2 can run Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and is a way to deploy applications using the Microsoft Web Platform, including ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Silver light, and Internet Information Server (IIS).

Amazon SimpleDB:-

Ø For database services, Amazon offers its Amazon SimpleDB. It provides core database functions of data indexing and querying.

Ø This service works closely with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon EC2. This provides the ability to store, process, and query data sets in the cloud.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3):-

Ø Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is Amazon’s storage solution for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers

Amazon Cloud Front:-

Ø Amazon CloudFront is a web service for content delivery. It works in conjunction with other Amazon Web Services to give developers and businesses an easy way to distribute content to clients.

Ø Amazon promises low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS):-

Ø Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a scalable, hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers.

Ø Developers can move data between distributed components of their applications that perform different tasks, without losing messages or requiring each component to be always available.

Elastic Block Store:-

Ø Amazon also launched its Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), a persistent storage feature for the Amazon EC2.

Ø Amazon EC2 is an infrastructure service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. With Amazon EBS, storage volumes can be programmatically created, attached.

Ø Amazon EC2 instances, and if even more durability is desired, can be backed with a snapshot to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Salesforce.com:-

Ø Salesforce.com made its name with the success of its flagship Salesforce.com automation application. Today, the company has three primary areas of focus:

The Sales Cloud:-The popular cloud computing sales application

The Service Cloud:-The platform for customer service that lets companies tap intothe power of customer conversations no matter where they take place

Your Cloud:-Powerful capabilities to develop custom applications on its cloudcomputing platform, Force.com

Ø The company has made its platform available to other companies as a place to build and deploy their software services.

Ø Force.com offers

§ A relational database

§ User interface options

§ Business logic

§ Apex, an integrated development environment

§ Workflow and approvals engine

§ Programmable interface

§ Automatic mobile device deployment

§ Web services integration

§ Reporting and analytics

Force.com:-

Ø Force.com is Salesforce.com’s on-demand cloud computing platform—billed by Salesforce

.com as the world’s first PaaS. Force.com features Visualforce, a technology.

Ø That makes it much simpler for end customers, developers, and independent software vendors (ISVs) to design almost any type of cloud application for a wide range of uses.

Ø The Force.com platform offers global infrastructure and services for database, logic, workflow, integration, user interface, and application exchange.

IBM:-

Ø IBM offers cloud computing services to help businesses of all sizes take advantage of this increasingly attractive computing model.

Ø IBM is applying its industry-specific consulting expertise and established technology record to offer secure services to companies in public, private, and hybrid cloud models.

Some of their features include:-

Industry-specific business consulting services:-

Ø For cloud computing IBM GlobalBusiness Services uses an economic model for assessing the total cost of ownershipfor building private clouds, and/or moving data and applications off-site in a publicor hybrid cloud model.

Technology consulting, design, and implementation services:-

Ø IBM GlobalTechnology Services offers services to help clients install, configure, and delivercloud computing inside the datacenter.

Cloud security:-

Ø Spanning IBM Systems, Software, Services and IBM’s Researchand X-Force arms, this effort is aimed at re-architecting and redesigning technologies and processes, to infuse security and shield against threats and vulnerabilities in the cloud.

UNIT-V

Cloud Computing Services:-

Infrastructure as a Service:-

Ø Let’s first talk about Infrastructure as a Service. In this scenario, you’re using the cloud provider’s machines. Another term for this type of computing is Everything as a Service.

Ø That is, you are using a virtualized server and running software on it. One of the most prevalent is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Ø Another player in the field is GoGrid. In this section we’ll take a closer look at both Amazon and GoGrid.

Amazon EC2:-

Ø web service that provides resizable computing capacity in the cloud. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows businesses to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction.

Ø It provides control of computing resources and lets organizations run on Amazon’s computing environment.

Load balancing:-

Ø Enables customers to balance incoming requests and distributetraffic across multiple Amazon EC2 compute instances.

Auto-scaling:-

Ø Automatically grows and shrinks usage of Amazon EC2 computecapacity based on application requirements.

Monitoring:-

Ø Enables customers to monitor operational metrics of Amazon EC2,providing even better visibility into usage of the AWS cloud.

Management:- Console Provides a simple, point-and-click web interface that lets customers manage and access their AWS cloud resources.

GoGrid:-

· Windows Server 2008 Standard with Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS 7)

· Windows Server 2008 Standard with IIS 7 and SQL Server 2005 Express Edition

· Windows Server 2008 Standard with IIS 7, SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, and ASP.NET

· Windows Server 2008 Standard includes Terminal Services Gateway, Remote Desktop Client for Terminal Services, Application Server, Active Directory Domain Services, DHCP Server, DNS Server, and SMTP.

Platform as a Service:-

Ø Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a way to build applications and have them hosted by the cloud provider.

Ø It allows you to deploy applications without having to spend the money to buy the servers on which to house them.

Ø In this section we’ll take a closer look at companies RightScale and Google.

Ø We’ll talk about their services, what they offer, and what other companies are getting out of those services.

Right Scale:-

Ø RightScale entered into a strategic product and partnership, broadening its cloud management platform to support emerging clouds from new vendors, including Flexi Scale and GoGrid.

Ø While continuing its support for Amazon’s EC2. RightScale is also working with Rack space to ensure compatibility with their cloud offerings,

Ø Including Mosso and CloudFS. RightScale offers an integrated management dashboard, where applications can be deployed once and managed across these and other clouds.

Salesforce.com:-

Ø Salesforce.com offers Force.com as its on-demand platform. Force.com features breakthrough Visualforce technology, which allows customers, developers, and ISVs to design any app, for any user, anywhere with the world’s first User Interface-as-a-Service.

Ø The Force.com platform offers global infrastructure and services for database, logic, workflow, integration, user interface, and application exchange.

Sales force and Gmail:-

Ø Businesses can now easily send, receive, and store emailcommunication, keeping a complete record of customer interactions for better sales execution and improved customer satisfaction.

Salesforce and Google Docs:-

Ø Create, manage, and share online GoogleDocuments, Google Spreadsheets, and Google Presentations within your sales organization, marketing group, or support team for instant collaboration.

Salesforce and Google Talk:-

Ø Instantly communicate with colleagues or customersfrom Salesforce and optionally attach Google Talk conversations to customer or prospect records stored in Salesforce.

Software plus Services:-

Ø Microsoft’s take on SaaS is slightly different with their Software plus Services (sometimes they shorten it to S+S).

Ø In this model, typical SaaS is bolstered with software running locally. That is, you run some software on-site and reach out to the cloud for additional services.

Ø This provides the flexibility of using a cloud provider, and also the reliability of having data stored on-site, as well.

Hardware and Infrastructure:-

Clients:-

Ø Ultimately, the clients on your end users’ desks are how you will interact with the cloud.

Ø In this section we’ll talk about the different types of clients and how they can be configured to communicate with the cloud.

Ø We’ll also talk about some security measures and how you can keep your data safe on the cloud.

Ø There are different types of clients that can link to the cloud, and each one offers a different way for you to interact with your data and applications.

Ø Depending on your organization and its needs, you may find yourself using any combination of these devices.

Ø How you interact with your data based on these clients will be a combination of factors—what your needs are, and the benefits and limitations of these client types.

Mobile:-

Ø Mobile clients run the gamut from laptops to PDAs and smartphones, like an iPhone or BlackBerry.

Ø You’re not likely to utilize a particularly robust application on a PDA or smartphone, but laptop users can connect to the cloud and access applications just as if they were sitting at their desk.

Ø Mobile clients, of course, have security and speed concerns. Because the clients will be connecting to the cloud from various locations that may not have an optimized connection.

Ø As in a hotel, you can’t expect the speed that a desk-bound client will achieve. But not all applications need speedy connections, and mobile users probably aren’t inputting gigabytes worth of data into a database.

Ø Further, since you can create your own applications in the cloud, they can be crafted with a mobile client in mind.

Ø While a mobile user won’t put tons of information into a database, an application can still be developed to let them access it.

Thin:-

Ø Thin clients, as we’ve mentioned before, are client computers that have no hard drives, no DVD-ROM drives, and simply display what’s on the server.

Ø Thins may have a role in your organization, but likely only if you have an in-house cloud. Of course, it depends on what applications and services you’re accessing on the cloud.

Ø If a client only needs toaccess cloud-based services or is accessing a virtualized server, then thin clients are a great option.

Ø They’re less expensive than thick clients, are much less expensive to maintain, and use lessenergy.

Thick:-

Ø Chances are that thick clients are the clients you already use and are likely to use to connect to applications in the cloud.

Ø You likely already have applications installed on your end users’ machines. While you can offload some of your applications to the cloud.

Ø chances are there are still going to be some mission-critical applications that simply need to stay in-house.

Security:-

Ø Security is the number one issue when it comes to cloud computing, and that only makes sense. Since a third party stores your data, you don’t know what’s going on with it.

Ø It’s easy to worry about the security risks of a cloud solution, but let’s not overlook the inherent security benefits, as well

Data Leakage:-

Ø The biggest benefit is the centralization of data. Organizations have an issue with asset protection, in no small part because of data being stored in numerous places, like laptops and the desktop.

Ø Thick clients are apt to download files and maintain them on the hard drive, and there are plenty of laptops out there with non encrypted files.

Forensics:-

Ø If there is a breach, the cloud provider can respond to the incident with less downtime than if you had to investigate the breach locally.

Ø it is easy to build a forensic server online, and it costs almost nothing until it comes into use.

Ø If there is a problem, the virtual machine can be cloned for easy offline analysis. Further, many companies don’t have a dedicated in-house incident response team.

Ø Ifthere is a problem, IT staff have to quickly figure out their new job of taking the server down, quickly investigating, and getting it back online for minimal production downtime.

Network:-

Ø We’ve talked about accessing the cloud via the Internet, and that is the case, in a general sort of way.

Ø In order for the cloud to deliver its best resources, there are differing levels of connectivity neededResearch firm Gartner identified four different levels in a June 2008 study.

Ø In the study, Gartner notes that different organizations require different things from the cloud, and as such they will have to connect in different ways.

Ø What works for one organization might not necessarily be the best means of connectivity for another.

Basic Public Internet:-

Ø The first option is the pipe most of us have coming into our office or homes. The public Internet is the most basic choice for cloud connectivity.

Ø This is the type of access that you buy from an Internet service provider (ISP) and connect with via broadband or dial-up, based on your location.

This model has the following advantages:-

· There’s a large audience. Anyone with Internet access can use this solution.

· It’s highly fault tolerant.

· Many provider options are available.

· Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)–based, Hypertext Transport Protocol Over Secure Sockets Layer (HTTPS), encrypted access provides confidentiality.

· It’s cost-effective.

It also has the following disadvantages:-

Ø Lack of end-to-end quality of service (QoS), thus making end-to-end service-level agreements (SLAs) difficult to reach.

Ø Probability of poor response over high-latency connections. This is worsened by protocol inefficiencies in TCP, HTTP, and web services.

Ø Downtime that might be out of your control (cable cuts, problems at the ISP, and so forth).

Accelerated Internet:-

Ø Employing advanced application delivery features on top of your Internet connection can benefit both the service provider and the client.

Ø Cloud improvement can increase by 20 percent to 50 percent by offloading network-related functions from the server.

Ø SSL termination and TCP connection management remove a significant amount of processing from the front-line servers.

Ø Additionally, dynamic caching, compression, and perfecting results in better than a 50 percent performance increase for end users.

Some providers offering this service include

· AT&T Hosting

· Citrix NetScalar

· F5’s WebAccelerator

Cloud Providers:-

Ø Cloud providers that use services dispersed across the cloud need a robust connection method.

Ø Private tunnels make sure that bandwidth, latency, and loss aren’t as likely to affect performance. Plus, encryption and strong authentication offer another benefit.

Ø Cloud providers that are growing might face big costs as network bandwidth charges increase.

Ø This traffic is from traffic both to and from clients as well as traffic among provider sites.

Ø Big providers, like Google, are able to sidestep these charges by building their own WANs with multiple peering points with major ISPs. Unfortunately, most cloud providers aren’t able to do this.

Ø Smaller providers can use WAN optimization controllers (WOCs) to reduce bandwidth requirements by up to 80 percent.

Cloud Consumers:-

Ø Large companies can build their own scalable distributed IT infrastructure in which datacenters are connected with their own private fiber optic connections.

Ø This depends on distance, bandwidth requirements, and—of course—their budgets. This infrastructure starts to look like a cloud computing service.

Ø Clients located at major sites normally access applications over the corporate WAN.

Ø For smaller offices or mobile workers, VPN connections across optimized and accelerated Internet services provide a more robust solution.

Ø VPN tunnels across the Internet are best as a primary link only when high performance is not crucial.

Redundancy:-

Ø When formulating your cloud infrastructure, be sure to consider the issue of reliability and uptime and ask your service provider to configure your computing infrastructure for redundancy and failover.

Ø In your LAN, redundancy used to mean that another server or two were added to the datacenter in case there was a problem.

Ø These days with virtualization, redundancy might mean a virtual server being cloned onto the same device, or all the virtual servers of one machine being cloned onto a second physical server.

Ø It becomes more complex in the cloud. While you may think of your server being hosted at the datacenter of your cloud provider, it’s not as easy to nail down.

Ø Parts of your data may be housed in one location and other parts scattered throughout the country (possibly even the world).

Ø And when the provider adds a redundant system, again the data is scattered throughout their cloud.

Ø So it’s not an issue of the service provider wheeling in a new server to provide redundant services.

Ø Rather, they simply reallocate resources to give you a redundant system.

Services:-

Ø There are different services you will need to run, depending on your cloud provider and what your organization does.

Ø Also, these services will likely affect how your cloud infrastructure is deployed.

Identity:-

Ø An OpenID is in the form of a uniform resource locator (URL) and does not rely on a central authority to authenticate a user’s identity.

Ø Since a specific type of authentication is not required, nonstandard forms of authentication may be used, including smart cards, biometric, or passwords.

OpenID authentication is used by many organizations, including:-

· Google

· IBM

· Microsoft

· Yahoo!

Integration:-

Ø Applications talking among themselves have become highly common.

Ø Vendors come up with all sorts of on-premises infrastructure services to accomplish it.

Ø These range from technologies like message queues to complex integration servers.

Ø Integration is also on the cloud and technologies are being developed for that use, as well.

Ø For example, Amazon’s Simple Queue Service (SQS) provides a way for applications to exchange messages via queues in the cloud

Ø SQS replicates messages across several queues, so an application reading from a queue may not see all messages from all queues on a given request.

Ø SQS also doesn’t guarantee in-order delivery. These sound like shortcomings, but in fact it’s these simplifications that make SQS more scalable, but it also means that developers must use SQS differently from on-premises messaging.

Mapping:-

Ø Maps are becoming more and more popular in web applications.

Ø For instance, hotel and restaurant web sites show their locations on their web sites and allow visitors to enter their addresses to get customized directions.

Ø But the guy who developed the web site likely didn’t have the time or money (not to mention the interest) to make his own mapping database.

Ø Enough organizations want this functionality, however, so it is offered as a cloud application.

Ø Such services as Google Maps and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth provide this cloud-based function, allowing developers to embed maps in web pages.

Payments:-

Ø Another cloud service that you might want to plan for and configure your hardware appropriately for is payments.

Ø Depending on your organization, you may or may not want to accept online payments from customers. Luckily, there is no lack of ways to get paid online.

Ø You can simply sign up with a service to accept credit cards, or you can go the route of PayPal. With an online payment service, customers can send money directly to your organization.

Search:-

Ø The ability to embed search options in a web site is certainly nothing new, but it is a rich feature that you might want to employ in your own web or application development.

Ø Microsoft’s Live Search allows on-site and cloud applications to submit searches and then get the results back.

Ø Searchability is limited only to the organization and what it does. For instance, a company might develop an application that does both.

Ø For instance, let’s say a company has a database of movie information.

Ø By typing in the name of the movie, you can search its own database as well as a search of the Internet to give you two types of results—what’s stored in the company database as well as what’s on the entire Web

Cloud Storage:-

Ø At the most rudimentary level, a cloud storage system just needs one data server connected to the Internet.

Ø A subscriber copies files to the server over the Internet, which then records the data.

Ø When a client wants to retrieve the data, he or she accesses the data server with a web-based interface, and the server then either sends the files back to the client or allows the client to access and manipulate the data itself.

Storage as a Service:-

Ø The term Storage as a Service (another Software as a Service, or SaaS, acronym) means that a third-party provider rents space on their storage to end users who lack the budget or capital budget to pay for it on their own.

Ø It is also ideal when technical personnel are not available or have inadequate knowledge to implement and maintain that storage infrastructure.

Ø Storage service providers are nothing new, but given the complexity of current backup, replication, and disaster recovery needs, the service has become popular, especially among small and medium-sized businesses.

Ø The biggest advantage to SaaS is cost savings. Storage is rented from the provider using a cost-per-gigabyte-stored or cost-per-data-transferred model.

Ø The end user doesn’t havepay for infrastructure; they simply pay for how much they transfer and save on the provider’s servers.

Security:-

Ø To secure data, most systems use a combination of techniquesEncryption A complex algorithm is used to encode information.

Ø To decode theencrypted files, a user needs the encryption key. While it’s possible to crack encrypted information,

Ø it’s very difficult and most hackers don’t have access to the amount of computer processing power they would need to crack the code.

Ø Authentication processes This requires a user to create a name and password.

Ø Authorization practices The client lists the people who are authorized to accessinformation stored on the cloud system.

Ø Many corporations have multiple levels of authorization. For example, a front-line employee might have limited access to data stored on the cloud and the head of the IT department might have complete and free access to everything.

Ø But even with these measures in place, there are still concerns that data stored on a remote system is vulnerable.

Ø There is always the concern that a hacker will find a way into the secure system and access the data.

Ø Also, a disgruntled employee could alter or destroy the data using his or her own access credentials.

Q) Reliability:-

Ans:-

Ø The other concern is reliability. If a cloud storage system is unreliable, it becomes a liability.

Ø No one wants to save data on an unstable system, nor would they trust a company that is financially unstable.

Ø Most cloud storage providers try to address the reliability concern through redundancy, but the possibility still exists that the system could crash and leave clients with no way to access their saved data.

Ø Reputation is important to cloud storage providers. If there is a perception that the provider is unreliable, they won’t have many clients.

Ø And if they are unreliable, they won’t be around long, as there are so many players in the market.

Q) Advantages:-

Ans:-

Ø Cloud storage is becoming an increasingly attractive solution for organizations.

Ø That’s because with cloud storage, data resides on the Web, located across storage systems rather than at a designated corporate hosting site.

Ø Cloud storage providers balance server loads and move data among various datacenters, ensuring that information is stored close—and thereby available quickly—to where it is used.

Ø Storing data on the cloud is advantageous, because it allows you to protect your data in case there’s a disaster.

Ø You may have backup files of your critical information, but if there is a fire or a hurricane wipes out your organization, having the backups stored locally doesn’t help.

Ø Having your data stored off-site can be the difference between closing your door for good or being down for a few days or weeks.

Ø Which storage vendor to go with can be a complex issue, and how your technology interacts with the cloud can be complex.

Ø For instance, some products are agent-based, and the application automatically transfers information to the cloud via FTP.

Ø But others employ a web front end, and the user has to select local files on their computer to transmit.

Ø Amazon S3 is the best-known storage solution, but other vendors might be better for large enterprises.

Ø For instance, those who offer service level agreements and direct access to customer support are critical for a business moving storage to a service provider.

Cautions:-

Ø A mixed approach might be the best way to embrace the cloud, since cloud storage is still immature.

Ø That is, don’t commit everything to the cloud, but use it for a few, noncritical purposes.

Ø Large enterprises might have difficulty with vendors like Google or Amazon, because they are forced to rewrite solutions for their applications and there is a lack of portability.

Ø A vendor like 3tera, however, supports applications developed in LAMP, Solaris, Java, or Windows.NET.

Ø The biggest deal-breakers when it comes to cloud storage seem to be price and reliability.

Ø This is where you have to vet your vendor to ensure you’re getting a good deal with quality service. One mistake on your vendor’s part could mean irretrievable data.

Ø A lot of companies take the “appetizer” approach, testing one or two services to see how well they mesh with their existing IT systems.

Ø It’s important to make sure the services will provide what you need before you commit too much to the cloud.

Ø Further, organizations have to be cognizant of the inherent danger of storing their data on the Internet.

Ø Amazon S3, for example, dealt with a massive outage in February 2008. The result was numerous client applications going offline.

Ø Amazon reports that they have responded to the problem, adding capacity to the authentication system blamed for the problem.

Ø They also note that no data was lost, because they store multiple copies of every object in several locations.

Ø The point remains, however, that clients were not able to access their data as they had intended, and so you need to use caution when deciding to pursue a cloud option.

Theft:-

Ø You should also keep in mind that your data could be stolen or viewed by those who are not authorized to see it.

Ø Whenever your data is let out of your own datacenter, you risk trouble from a security point of view.

Whenever you let your data out of your organization, you give up a measure of security.

Ø Also, because storage providers put everything into one pot, so to speak

Ø your company’s data could be stored next to a competitor’s, and the risk of your competition seeing your proprietary information is real.

Ø If you do store your data on the cloud, make sure you’re encrypting data and securing data transit with technologies like SSL.

Cloud Storage Providers:-

Ø In this section we’re going to talk about some of the cloud providers out there.

Ø This list is not meant to be comprehensive—there’s no way it could be.

Ø There are hundreds of them and new players every day.

Ø This is simply a listing of what some of the big players in the game have to offer, and you can use it as a starting guide to determine if their services match your needs.

Ø Amazon and Nirvanix are the current industry top dogs, but many others are in the field, including some well-known names.

Ø Google is ready to launch its own cloud storage solution called GDrive.

Ø EMC is readying a storage solution, and IBM already has a number of cloud storage options called Blue Cloud.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3):-

Ø The best-known cloud storage service is Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3), which launched in 2006. Amazon S3 is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Ø Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the Web.

Ø It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.

Ø The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

Ø Amazon S3 is intentionally built with a minimal feature set that includes the following functionality:

· Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. The number of objects that can be stored is unlimited.

· Each object is stored and retrieved via a unique developer-assigned key.

· Objects can be made private or public, and rights can be assigned to specific users.

· Uses standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit.

Design Requirements:-

Ø Amazon built S3 to fulfill the following design requirements:

Scalable:-

Ø Amazon S3 can scale in terms of storage, request rate, and users tosupport an unlimited number of web-scale applications.

Reliable :-

Ø Store data durably, with 99.99 percent availability. Amazon says it doesnot allow any downtime.

Fast:-

Ø Amazon S3 was designed to be fast enough to support high-performanceapplications.

Ø Server-side latency must be insignificant relative to Internet latency. Any performance bottlenecks can be fixed by simply adding nodes to the system.

Inexpensive :-

Ø Amazon S3 is built from inexpensive commodity hardwarecomponents.

Ø As a result, frequent node failure is the norm and must not affect the overall system.

Ø It must be hardware-agnostic, so that savings can be captured as Amazon continues to drive down infrastructure costs.

Simple:-

Ø Building highly scalable, reliable, fast, and inexpensive storage is difficult.

Ø Doing so in a way that makes it easy to use for any application anywhere is more difficult. Amazon S3 must do both.

Nirvanix:-

Ø Nirvanix uses custom-developed software and file system technologies running on Intel storage servers at six locations on both coasts of the United States.

Ø They continue to grow, and expect to add dozens more server locations

Google Bigtable Datastore:-

Ø In cloud computing, it’s important to have a database that is capable of handling numerous users on an on-demand basis.

Ø To serve that market, Google introduced its Bigtable. Google started working on it in 2004 and finally went public with it in April 2008.

Ø Bigtable was developed with very high speed, flexibility, and extremely high scalability in mind.

Ø A Bigtable database can be petabytes in size and span thousands of distributed servers.

Ø Bigtable is available to developers as part of the Google App Engine, their cloud computing platform.

Mobile Me:-

Ø Mobile Me is Apple’s solution that delivers push email, push contacts.

Ø And push calendars from the Mobile Me service in the cloud to native applications on iPhone, iPod touch, Macs, and PCs.

Ø MobileMe also provides a suite of ad-free web applications that deliver a desktop-like experience through any modern browser.

Ø MobileMe applications (www.me.com) include Mail, Contacts, and Calendar, as well as Gallery for viewing and sharing photos and iDisk for storing and exchanging documents online.

Live Mesh:-

Ø Live Mesh is Microsoft’s “software-plus-services” platform and experience that enables PCs and other devices to be aware of each other through the Internet,

Ø Enabling individuals and organizations to manage, access, and share their files and applications seamlessly on the Web and across their world of devices.

Ø Live Mesh has the following components:

Ø A platform that defines and models a user’s digital relationships among devices, data, applications, and people—made available to developers through an open data model and protocols.

Ø A cloud service providing an implementation of the platform hosted in Microsoft datacenters.

Ø Software, a client implementation of the platform that enables local applications to run offline and interact seamlessly with the cloud.

A platform experience that exposes the key benefits of the platform for bringing together a user’s devices, files and applications, and social graph, with news feeds across all of theseØ But even with these measures in place, there are still concerns that data stored on a remote system is vulnerable.

Ø There is always the concern that a hacker will find a way into the secure system and access the data.

Ø Also, a disgruntled employee could alter or destroy the data using his or her own access credentials.

Q) Reliability:-

Ans:-

Ø The other concern is reliability. If a cloud storage system is unreliable, it becomes a liability.

Ø No one wants to save data on an unstable system, nor would they trust a company that is financially unstable.

Ø Reputation is important to cloud storage providers. If there is a perception that the provider is unreliable, they won’t have many clients.

Ø And if they are unreliable, they won’t be around long, as there are so many players in the market.

Advantages:-