Advantages of using Cloud
The advantages for using cloud services can be of technical, architectural, business
et
1. Cloud Providers’ point of view
(a) Most of the data centers today are under utilized. They are mostly 15%
utilized. These data centers need spare capacity just to cope with the
huge spikes that sometimes get in the server usage. Large companies
having those data centers can easily rent those computing power to other
organizations and get profit out of it and also make the resources needed
for running data center (like power) utilized properly.
(b) Companies having large data centers have already deployed the resources
and to provide cloud services they would need very little investment and
the cost would be incremental.
2. Cloud Users’ point of view
(a) Cloud users need not to take care about the hardware and software they
use and also they don’t have to be worried about maintenance. The users
are no longer tied to some one traditional system.
(b) Virtualization technology gives the illusion to the users that they are
having all the resources available.
(c) Cloud users can use the resources on demand basis and pay as much as
they use. So the users can plan well for reducing their usage to minimize
their expenditure.
(d) Scalability is one of the major advantages to cloud users. Scalability is
provided dynamically to the users. Users get as much resources as they
need. Thus this model perfectly fits in the management of rare spikes in
the demand.
Cloud computing is not a new idea but it is an evolution of some old paradigm of
distributed computing. The advent of the enthusiasm about cloud computing in
recent past is due to some recent technology trend and business models
1. High demand of interactive applications – Applications with real time response
and with capability of providing information either by other users or by non-
human sensors gaining more and more popularity today. These are generally
attracted to cloud not only because of high availability but also because these
services are generally data intensive and require analyzing data across different
sources.
2. Parallel batch processing – Cloud inherently supports batch-processing and
analyzing tera-bytes of data very efficiently. Programming models like Google’s
map-reduce [18] and Yahoo!’s open source counter part Hadoop can be used
to do these hiding operational complexity of parallel processing of hundreds
of cloud computing servers.
3. New trend in business world and scientific community – In recent times the
business enterprises are interested in discovering customers needs, buying pat-
terns, supply chains to take top management decisions. These require analysis
of very large amount of online data. This can be done with the help of cloud
very easily. Yahoo! Homepage is a very good example of such thing. In the
homepage they show the hottest news in the country. And according to the
users’ interest they change the ads and other sections in the page. Other than
these many scientific experiments need very time consuming data processing
jobs like LHC (Large Hadron Collider). Those can be done by cloud.
4. Extensive desktop application – Some desktop applications like Matlab, Math-
ematica are becoming so compute intensive that a single desktop machine is
no longer enough to run them. So they are developed to be capable of using
cloud computing to perform extensive evaluations.
Cloud computing is a recently developing paradigm of distributed computing. Though
it is not a new idea that emerged just recently. In 1969 [16] L. Kleinrock anticipated,
“As of now, computer networks are still in their infancy. But as they grow up and
become more 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.” His vision was the true indication of today’s utility based
computing paradigm. One of the giant steps towards this world was taken in mid
1990s when grid computing was first coined to allow consumers to obtain computing
power on demand. The origin of cloud computing can be seen as an evolution of
grid computing technologies. The term Cloud computing was given prominence first
by Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt in late 2006 (may be he coined the term) [6]. So
the birth of cloud computing is very recent phenomena although its root belongs to
some old ideas with new business, technical and social perspectives. From the archi-
tectural point of view cloud is naturally build on an existing grid based architecture
and uses the grid services and adds some technologies like virtualization and some
business models.
In brief cloud is essentially a bunch of commodity computers networked to-
gether in same or different geographical locations, operating together to serve a
number of customers with different need and workload on demand basis with the
help of virtualization. Cloud services are provided to the cloud users as utility ser-
vices like water, electricity, telephone using pay-as-you-use business model. These
utility services are generally described as XaaS (X as a Service) where X can be
Software or Platform or Infrastructure etc. Cloud users use these services provided
by the cloud providers and build their applications in the internet and thus deliver
them to their end users. So the cloud users don’t have to worry about installing,
maintaining hardware and software needed. And they also can afford these services
as they have to pay as much they use. So the cloud users can reduce their expen-
diture and effort in the field of IT using cloud services instead of establishing IT
infrastructure themselves.
Cloud is essentially provided by large distributed data centers. These data
centers are often organized as grid and the cloud is built on top of the grid services.
Cloud users are provided with virtual images of the physical machines in the data
centers. This virtualization is one of the key concept of cloud computing as it
essentially builds the abstraction over the physical system. Many cloud applications
are gaining popularity day by day for their availability, reliability, scalability and
utility model. These applications made distributed computing easy as the critical aspects are handled by the cloud provider itself.
Cloud computing is growing now-a-days in the interest of technical and busi-
ness organizations but this can also be beneficial for solving social issues. In the
recent time E-Governance is being implemented in developing countries to improve
efficiency and effectiveness of governance. This approach can be improved much by
using cloud computing instead of traditional ICT. In India, economy is agriculture
based and most of the citizens live in rural areas. The standard of living, agricul-
tural productivity etc can be enhanced by utilizing cloud computing in a proper
way. Both of these applications of cloud computing have technological as well as
social challenges to overcome.
In this report we would try to clarify some of the ideas – Why is cloud
computing a buzzword today? i.e. what are the benefits the provider and the users
get using cloud? Though its idea has come long back in 1990 but what situation
made it indispensable today? How is cloud built? What differentiates it from similar
terms like grid computing and utility computing? What are the different services are
provided by the cloud providers? Though cloud computing now-a-days talks about
business enterprises not the non-profit organizations; how can this new paradigm
be used in the services like e-governance and in social development issues of rural
India?
