Define cloud

Cloud computing 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. The term cloud has historically been used in the
telecommunications industry as an abstraction of the network in system diagrams.
• Cloud computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet
and the hardware and system software in the datacenters that provide those services.
• definition proposed by the U.S. 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
Define cloud
Continue...
• According to Reese [29], we can define three criteria to discriminate
whether a service is delivered in the cloud computing style:
• The service is accessible via a Web browser (nonproprietary) or a
Web services application programming interface (API).
• Zero capital expenditure is necessary to get started.
• You pay only for what you use as you use it
Continue...
• many cloud computing services are freely available for single users,
enterprise(business)- class services are delivered according a specific
pricing scheme.
• In this case users subscribe to the service and establish with the service
provider a service-level agreement (SLA) defining the quality-of-service
parameters under which the service is delivered.
• A cloud is a type of parallel and distributed system consisting of a
collection of interconnected and virtualized computers that are
dynamically provisioned and presented as one or more unified computing
resources based on service-level agreements established through
negotiation between the service provider and consumers.
A closer look:
• Cloud computing is helping enterprises, governments, public and private
institutions, and research organizations shape more effective and demand-
driven computing systems.
• Practical examples of such systems exist across all market segments:
Large enterprises can offload some of their activities to cloud-based systems
(the New York Times has converted its digital library of past editions into a
Web-friendly format through amazon EC2 cloud resources).
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 using amazon web services).
Continue...
• End users can have their documents accessible from everywhere and
any device.
• 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 using Google App Engine).
Cloud Computing Reference model
• Cloud computing supports any IT service that can be consumed as a utility and delivered through a network, most likely
the Internet.
• Cloud infrastructure can be heterogeneous in nature because a variety of resources, such as clusters and even networked
PCs, can be used to build it. Moreover, database systems and other storage services can also be part of the infrastructure.
• The physical infrastructure is managed by the core middleware, the objectives of which are to provide an appropriate
runtime environment for applications and to best utilize resources.
Deployment Model
• Deployment models: This refers to the location and management of the cloud’s
infrastructure.
• Types of Clouds:
• Public clouds. The cloud is open to the wider public.
• Private clouds. The cloud is implemented within the private premises of an institution
and generally made accessible to the members of the institution or a subset of them.
• Hybrid or heterogeneous clouds. The cloud is a combination of the two previous
solutions and most likely identifies a private cloud that has been augmented with
resources or services hosted in a public cloud.
• Community clouds. The cloud is characterized by a multi-administrative domain
involving different deployment models (public, private, and hybrid), and it is specifically
designed to address the needs of a specific industry.
Public Cloud:
• services offered are made available to anyone, from anywhere, and at any
time through the Internet.
• Historically, public clouds were the first class of cloud that were
implemented and offered. Currently, public clouds are used both to
completely replace the IT infrastructure of enterprises and to extend it when
it is required.
• A fundamental characteristic of public clouds is multitenancy. A public cloud
is meant to serve a multitude of users, not a single customer. Any customer
requires a virtual computing environment that is separated, and most likely
isolated, from other users.
• QoS management is a very important aspect of public clouds
Continue..
• A public cloud can offer any kind of service: infrastructure, platform, or applications.
• For example, Amazon EC2 is a public cloud that provides infrastructure as a service; Google AppEngine
is a public cloud that provides an application development platform as a service; and SalesForce.com
is a public cloud that provides software as a service.
• They are available to everyone and are generally architected to support a large quantity of users.
• characterizes them is their natural ability to scale on demand and sustain peak loads.
• Public clouds can be composed of geographically dispersed datacenters to share the load of users and
better serve them according to their locations.
• For example, Amazon Web Services has datacenters installed in the United States, Europe, Singapore,
and Australia; they allow their customers to choose between three different regions: us-west-1, us-
east-1, or eu-west-1.
• According to the specific class of services delivered by the cloud, a different software stack is installed
to manage the infrastructure: virtual machine managers, distributed middleware, or distributed
applications.
Private Cloud:
• In the case of public clouds, the provider is in control of the infrastructure and, eventually, of the customers’
core logic and sensitive data.
• institutions such as government and military agencies will not consider public clouds as an option for
processing or storing their sensitive data.
• For example, the USA PATRIOT Act provides its government and other agencies with virtually limitless powers
to access information, including that belonging to any company that stores information in the U.S. territory.
• Private clouds are virtual distributed systems that rely on a private infrastructure and provide internal users
with dynamic provisioning of computing resources. Instead of a pay-as-you-go model as in public clouds,
there could be other schemes in place, taking into account the usage of the cloud and proportionally billing
the different departments or sections of an enterprise.
• Another interesting opportunity that comes with private clouds is the possibility of testing applications and
systems at a comparatively lowerprice rather than public clouds before deploying them on the public virtual
infrastructure.
• Private clouds have the advantage of keeping the core business operations in-house by relying on the existing
IT infrastructure and reducing the burden of maintaining it once the cloud has been set up.
Advantages of using a private cloud
computing infrastructure:
• Customer information protection
• Infrastructure ensuring SLAs (appropriate clustering and failover, data
replication, system monitoring and maintenance, and disaster
recovery)
• Compliance with standard procedures and operations.
Hybrid Computing:
• Public clouds are large software and hardware infrastructures that have a capability that is huge enough
to serve the needs of multiple users, but they suffer from security threats and administrative pitfall.
• Private clouds are the perfect solution when it is necessary to keep the processing of information within
an enterprise’s premises or it is necessary to use the existing hardware and software infrastructure.
• One of the major drawbacks of private deployments is the inability to scale on demand and to efficiently
address peak loads.
• a hybrid solution could be an interesting opportunity for taking advantage of the best of the private and
public worlds.
• Hybrid clouds allow enterprises to exploit existing IT infrastructures, maintain sensitive information
within the premises, and naturally grow and shrink by provisioning external resources and releasing
them when they’re no longer needed.
• a hybrid cloud: It is a heterogeneous distributed system resulting from a private cloud that integrates
additional services or resources from one or more public clouds. For this reason they are also called
heterogeneous clouds.
Hybrid cloud:
• Hybrid clouds address scalability issues by leveraging external
resources for exceeding capacity demand. These resources or services
are temporarily leased for the time required and then released. This
practice is also known as cloudbursting.
• Infrastructure management software and PaaS solutions are the
building blocks for deploying and managing hybrid clouds.
• For example, Aneka provides a provisioning service that leverages
different IaaS providers for scaling the existing cloud infrastructure
Community Cloud:
• Community clouds are distributed systems created by integrating the
services of different clouds to address the specific needs of an industry, a
community, or a business sector.
• The infrastructure is shared by several organizations and supports a specific
community that has shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements,
policy, and compliance considerations). It may be managed by the
organizations or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise.
• From an architectural point of view, a community cloud is most likely
implemented over multiple administrative domains. This means that
different organizations such as government bodies, and even public virtual
infrastructure providers contribute with their resources to build the cloud
infrastructure.
Candidate sectors for community clouds are as follows:
• Media industry(Community clouds can provide a shared environment where services can
facilitate business-to-business collaboration and offer the horsepower in terms of
aggregate bandwidth, CPU, and storage required to efficiently support media production.)
• Healthcare industry(The naturally hybrid deployment model of community clouds can
easily support the storing of patient-related data in a private cloud while using the shared
infrastructure for non critical services and automating processes within hospitals).
• Energy and other core industries(in these sectors, community clouds can bundle the
comprehensive set of solutions that together vertically address management,
deployment, and orchestration of services and operations).
• Public sectors(Legal and political restrictions in the public sector can limit the adoption of
public cloud offerings).
• Scientific research(the common interest driving different organizations sharing a large
distributed infrastructure is scientific computing).
Continue...
The benefits of these community clouds are the following:
• Openness.
• Community
• Graceful failures
Characteristics and benefits:
• No up-front commitments (no advance fee)
• On-demand access
• Nice pricing
• Simplified application acceleration and scalability
• Efficient resource allocation
• Energy efficiency
• Seamless creation and use of third-party services
• Increased economical return
• Multitenancy
Challenges:
1. Cloud interoperability and standard:
• To fully realize this goal, introducing standards and allowing interoperability between
solutions offered by different vendors are objectives of fundamental importance. Vendor
lock-in constitutes one of the major strategic barriers against the seamless adoption of
cloud computing at all stages.
• Vendor lock-in can prevent a customer from switching to another competitor’s solution, or
when this is possible, it happens at considerable conversion cost and requires significant
amounts of time.
• the first steps toward a standardization process have been made, and a few organizations,
such as the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF).
• the Open Cloud Consortium,10 and the DMTF Cloud Standards Incubator,11 are leading the
path. Another interesting initiative is the Open Cloud Manifesto,12 which embodies the
point of view of various stakeholders on the benefits of open standards in the field.
• In particular, in the IaaS market, the use of a proprietary virtual machine format
constitutes the major reasons for the vendor lock-in, and efforts to provide virtual
machine image compatibility between IaaS vendors can possibly improve the level of
interoperability among them.
• The Open Virtualization Format (OVF) [51] is an attempt to provide a common
format for storing the information and metadata describing a virtual machine image.
• Even though the OVF provides a full specification for packaging and distributing
virtual machine images in completely platform-independent fashion, it is supported
by few vendors that use it to import static virtual machine images.
• The challenge is providing standards for supporting the migration of running
instances, thus allowing the real ability of switching from one infrastructure vendor
to another in a completely transparent manner.
• In the IaaS market, Amazon Web Services plays a leading role, and
other IaaS solutions, mostly open source, provide AWS-compatible
APIs, thus constituting themselves as valid alternatives. Even in this
case, there is no consistent trend in devising some common APIs for
interfacing with IaaS (and, in general, XaaS), and this constitutes one
of the areas in which a considerable improvement can be made in the
future.
Scalability and fault tolerance
• To implement such a capability, the cloud middleware has to be designed
with the principle of scalability along different dimensions in mind—for
example, performance, size, and load.
• The cloud middleware manages a huge number of resource and users, which
rely on the cloud to obtain the horsepower that they cannot obtain within
the premises without bearing considerable administrative and maintenance
costs. These costs are a reality for whomever develops, manages, and
maintains the cloud middleware and offers the service to customers.
• In this scenario, the ability to tolerate failure becomes fundamental,
sometimes even more important than providing an extremely efficient and
optimized system.
• Hence, the challenge in this case is designing highly scalable and fault-
tolerant systems that are easy to manage and at the same time
provide competitive performance.
Security, trust, and privacy
• The traditional cryptographic technologies are used to prevent data tampering and
access to sensitive information. The massive use of virtualization technologies
exposes the existing system to new threats, which previously were not considered
applicable.
• The lack of control over their own data and processes also poses severe problems
for the trust we give to the cloud service provider and the level of privacy we want
to have for our data.
• In this case there is a chain of responsibilities in terms of service delivery that can
introduce more vulnerability for the secure management of data, the enforcement
of privacy rules, and the trust given to the service provider.
• The challenges in this area are, then, mostly concerned with devising secure and
trustable systems from different perspectives: technical, social, and legal.
Organizational aspects:
Some interesting questions arise in considering the role of the IT
department in this new scenario. In particular, the following questions
have to be considered:
• What is the new role of the IT department in an enterprise that
completely or significantly relies on the cloud?
• How will the compliance department perform its activity when there is
a considerable lack of control over application workflows?
• What are the implications (political, legal, etc.) for organizations that
lose control over some aspects of their services?
• What will be the perception of the end users of such services?
• Traditionally, when there was a problem with computer systems, organizations
developed strategies and solutions to cope with them, often by relying on local
expertise and knowledge. One of the major advantages of moving IT infrastructure
and services to the cloud is to reduce or completely remove the costs related to
maintenance and support.
• As a result, users of such infrastructure and services lose a reference to deal with
for IT troubleshooting.
• At the same time, the existing IT staff is required to have a different kind of
competency and, in general, fewer skills, thus reducing their value.
• These are the challenges from an organizational point of view that must be faced
and that will significantly change the relationships within the enterprise itself
among the various groups of people working together
What is Cloud Migration?

• Cloud migration is the process of moving digital assets — like data, workloads, IT resources, or applications
— to cloud infrastructure. Cloud migration commonly refers to moving tools and data from old, legacy
infrastructure or an on-premises* data center to the cloud.
• Though “cloud migration” typically refers to moving things from on-premises to the cloud, it can also refer to
moving from one cloud to another cloud. A migration may involve moving all or just some assets. 
• What is the cloud exactly? The cloud — often used as shorthand for “cloud computing” — refers to a pool of
computer services accessed over the internet.
• Why is it called the cloud? actually comes from the symbol used in conceptual network diagrams from the
1970s. 

• But when people are doing things on the internet, they’re probably
using cloud services — from checking Gmail to uploading a dog pics to
Instagram to streaming Adam Sandler movies on Netflix.
Why do businesses migrate to the cloud?

• one big reason is that working in the cloud gives you access to
virtually limitless computer resources. 
• e.g. The cloud is like electricity.
• The plain and simple of it is this: Cloud abstracts and serves up IT on
tap. You get servers and computer services without the need to buy,
maintain, and manage hardware or dedicate employees to the low-
level admin work that comes with that.
• Cloud deployment models
• Cloud services model
What are the benefits of migrating to the cloud?

• At a basic level, the benefits of cloud are often around efficiency, achieving the maximum
results with minimal expense.
• Seven big benefits of migrating to the cloud.
1. Elasticity and scalability
2. Cost savings and effectiveness(taking an Uber instead of buying a car)
3. Move from CapEx to OpEx
4. Agility and Flexibility
“Cloud agility” is often used to describe the ability to quickly develop, test, and launch business
applications. But cloud also gives you the agility to respond quickly as needs change. 
5. Performance, Reliability, and Resiliency 
6. Security and Compliance
7. Less Maintenance and Simplification of IT