The cloud is an extension of the internet with a degree of discipline and ethics. Cloud can be viewed as the union of information technology with business intelligence. The technology combines virtualization, grid functionalities and web standards into a single consumption model, delivered to customers over the Internet, with business intelligence defining the best cost schemes resulting in a win-win situation for both the cloud service provider and the cloud service provider also led to the enterprise consumers of cloud services.
Cloud brokers negotiate the best deals and relationships between cloud consumers and cloud providers. You can use specialized tools to identify the most suitable cloud resource and map application requirements onto it.
Components of Cloud
Cloud Service Consumption: Cloud service consumers are the end users, referred to as clients, who interact with the system and request services as needed.
The client can be categories in to the following categories:-
- Mobile clients
- Thin clients
- Thick clients
Cloud Service Provider: Cloud service providers are the agents that host the servers in the cloud and provide services to the end users. The big cloud providers are Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc.
Medium Internet: Medium Internet is the communication channel between consumer and provider, on which services are diverted.
Characteristics of Cloud
Self-Service on Demand: As a cloud consumer, users have the privilege to request and deploy computing feature packs with services with or without an approval process, supported by automation and workflows.
Pervasive Network Access: These are the characteristics that allow user and server computing devices to be accessed over the network, even using next-generation heterogeneous devices such as thin, thick client, etc.
Resource Pooling: This feature refers to the pooling of resources across multiple data centers. These pooled virtual data centers are then split into multiple pools to provide their services to different consumers in a multi-tenant model.
Challenges in Cloud
Lack of Control: In the event of a lack of control by delegating IT management to a third party, the service consumer loses the ability to directly control and monitor the execution of the submitted workload.
Security: For security reasons, reliance on the storage of confidential company data by third parties is a source of potential concern and must be effectively addressed by the cloud service provider.
Resource Management: The management of compute, storage and other resources in a distributed system is recognized as a difficult problem.
Cloud Services
Infrastructure as a Service: The infrastructure as a service model allows the customer to provision processing, storage, networking and other critical software such as operating system and applications. The customer has no control over the underlying infrastructure, but has control over the operating system storage and the deployed applications
Platform as a Service: Platforms A service model provides the customer with the ability to deploy the customer-built applications on the noisy infrastructure using the programming language or tools supported by the cloud provider. It also offers the solution for integrating cloud computing into existing applications, services and infrastructure with a market-oriented approach.
Software as a Service: The software model allows the customer to use the provided application hosted on the cloud infrastructure. In this model, the customer has no control over the cloud infrastructure, but has some control over the application configuration settings.
Benefits of Cloud
- Increased agility in IT data center resources and innovation.
- Complete control over cloud usage or administrators is possible.
- Increasing the operational efficiency of resources in the IT data center.
- Scalability and flexibility enable the infrastructure-as-a-service cloud to deliver on the promise of unlimited on-demand IT services.
- Dynamic sharing of the resources available in the IT data center.
- Usage-based payment and no billing as usage decreases.
