The curtain of Cloud! (Part 1)

1. Introduction

Imagine yourself being a Chief Information Officer of a global bank. Your company uses high-performance computing software and systems for worldwide tasks and development that support the analysis of large-scale research data and modeling.

Recently, there was a surge in the demand for the software and systems for a project. To handle the peak computing needs of the company what will you do?

What modern solution comes to your mind? Do you buy high computing servers and then set up them in the storage that you purchase and appoint certain workers for its maintenance?

This will be too much work and mostly your answer will be Big NO! NO! You will tend towards virtual cloud solutions.

And then you save money on additional hardware and software as you save money on additional hardware and software. Using this solution will ensure the security of information and enable the company to integrate it with other aspects of existing infrastructure as well.

Cloud computing is a method of leveraging computer platform and application resources in a hosted environment that allows resource optimization, rapid elasticity, and multi-modal access, (access from multiple devices) that can be measured for performance and load parameters.

2. Uses

On-Demand Self Service is the ability for an end-user to sign up and receive services without long delays.

Broad Network Access is the ability to access a service via standard platforms, such as desktop, laptop, and mobile.

Resource pooling across multiple customers.

Rapid Elasticity is the capability to scale to cope with demand peaks.

Measured Service is the metered billing and delivery as a utility service.

To sum up, the cloud is a set of hardware, networks, storage, services, and interfaces that allows the delivery of computing as a service.

3. Categories of Cloud

Cloud computing is divided into four main categories.

Let's discuss each of them.

3.1 Public Cloud

A public cloud is one where services and infrastructure are provided off-site over the Internet.

You can choose the public cloud in case of standardized workload for applications used by lots of people, need for testing and developing an application code, Software as a Service, or SaaS, applications from a public vendor, need incremental capacity, working on collaboration projects, and developing software by using Platform as a Service, or PaaS.

3.2 Private Cloud

In a private cloud, the services and infrastructure are maintained and used within the private network of an organization.

You can choose a private cloud when the core business involves data and applications, a business must adhere to strict security and data privacy, and the business can run a next-generation cloud data center efficiently and effectively.

3.3 Hybrid Cloud

You can choose a hybrid cloud when: Your company wants to use a SaaS application but is concerned about security.

Your SaaS vendor can create a private cloud just for your company inside their firewall, and provide you with a VPN for additional security.

Your company offers services that are tailored for different vertical markets.

You can use a public cloud to interact with the clients, but keep their data secured within a private cloud.

3.4 Community Cloud

A community cloud refers to the ability of an application to provide solutions based on inputs from the consumer and/or users themselves and then offer them back as a solution to the customer.

Innocentive@work is an example of an enterprise innovation management software that provides crowd-sourcing solutions for achieving various types of business objectives.

4. Why does Businesses Use Cloud?

A business always finds new ways to scale up and respond, because it: Adapts to changing business, government, and consumer characteristics; evaluates new business partnerships, and faces stiff competition.

Cloud Computing has some characteristics that help businesses scale up and adapt quickly to changing environments.

Let's discuss them with the help of examples.

Let's discuss a scenario where mid-size organizations easily run more than 500 servers.

Considering a load factor of 50 percent, roughly 250 servers are lying idle.

Investment has been made, but resources have not been utilized.

This situation presents an opportunity to optimize the load factor by 50 percent.

Similarly, today the economic size of a hard disk is 500 Gigabytes.

However, in the office, the actual data consumption is less than two to four Gigabytes.

Even if 20 percent of users had to use more than 100 Gigabytes of office data, it goes to prove that roughly 80 percent of disk capacity is never utilized.

This situation presents an opportunity to optimize disk space usage by 80 percent.

In another scenario, the system has more than two to four Gigabytes of RAM, but normally the sustained usage of RAM is much lower.

Mostly, it hovers at less than 60 percent of the installed capacity.

This situation presents an opportunity to optimize the RAM space usage by 40 percent.

The power consumption of a thin client is well under three to four Watts.

Thin clients are computing devices with CPU, memory resources, keyboard, or mouse that do not have disk drives or DVD drives.

These are client hardware in the client/server environment that is dependent on the server for loading applications.

Compare this with an average desktop that takes up to 300 Watts and you would realize the huge savings it has on mere power consumption.

This situation presents huge savings in power consumption and 24 hours of power backup.

Cloud computing is often described as a stack, in response to the wide range of services built on top of one another under the moniker "cloud".

A cloud computing paradigm takes this IT stack and converts it into a service that allows you to create, own, and use a machine, without actually having to acquire or buy any physical infrastructure.

Thus, an organization can have zero server infrastructure, application, or platform and yet be able to deploy the world's most robust infrastructure and application layer needed for efficient organization operation.

Having identified the reasons why businesses consider the cloud as a viable option and the various layers of a cloud computing stack.