Cloud Concepts

When most people talk about “cloud computing”, they usually refer to online delivery and consumption models for business and customer services. These services include IT services like software-as-a-service (SaaS) and storage or server capacity as a “service” but also many, many “nonIT” business and consumer services which are not “computing” tasks per se. And so, in our definitional framework, we distinguish between “Cloud”, “Cloud Services” and “Cloud Computing”:

• Cloud is a pool of highly scalable, abstracted infrastructure, capable of hosting end customer applications, that is billed by consumption.
• Cloud Services refer to the consumer and business products, services and solutions that are delivered and consumed in real time over the web.
• Cloud Computing is an emerging IT development, deployment and delivery model, enabling real-time delivery of products, services, and solutions over the web (i.e., enabling cloud services)
In engineering terms, cloud computing refers to providing services on virtual machines allocated on top of a large machine pool whereas in business terms, the term means a method to address scalability and availability concerns for large scale applications. In short, cloud computing is a way of democratized distributed computing.
A cloud service, according to Forrester, exhibits the following  six key characteristics:

1. Standardized IT based capability: Delivers compute, storage, network or software-based capabilities, solely or in combination
   through standard offerings.

2. Accessible via Internet protocols from any computer: Standards based, universal network access through a regular web browser via HTTP, REST or SOAP protocols.

3. Always available, and scales automatically to adjust to demand: Resilient and highly available yet elastic to cope up with scale and demand.

4. Pay-per-use or advertising-based: Service is paid up in three ways advertising, subscription or transaction based.

5. Web or programmatic-based control interfaces: Uses service-based interfaces like XML and REST style software connection standards, such as Flickr API or the Amazon S3.

6. Offers full customer self service: Customers can provision, manage, and terminate services themselves and the control is via a web interface or programmatic calls to service APIs.

An alternate view on the properties of a cloud service, assumes these six properties:

(1) user centric

(2) task centric

(3) powerful

(4) accessible

(5) intelligent

(6) programmable.

1. User centric: The data and the application moves with the user, where ever he goes. The data is always stored in the cloud documents, spreadsheets, presentations, email, images, so that once the user is connected to the cloud, he can access the data via any PC or mobile device or share it with others.

2. Task Centric: The traditional business applications can be composed and laid out in a taskspecific manner. For example, the applications of the past spreadsheets, email, calendar are becoming standard modules of any collaborative environment, and can be composed and managed in task centric fashion to achieve the intended business goals.

3. Powerful: The service gives cheap and ample amounts of resources to do the required processing or computation beyond the realm of normal PCs.

4. Accessible: Cloud services are accessible over a variety of devices and formats. If required, they also involve combining different data sources to provide accessible results.
5. Intelligent: Massive data analysis and large data sets gives intelligence that is often missed in other alternate forms, at cheaper costs.
6. Programmable: To access the vast amounts of computing processing power and to deal with fault tolerance and shared memory access against big data problems, cloud services adopt new programming paradigms that help ease the complexity

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