The idea of cloud computing is a rather old yet confusing state of matter. The word itself was first coined in the 1990s, but the true era of Cloud Computing was started around 2006 when large companies such as Google and Amazon began using "cloud computing" to describe the new paradigm in which people are increasingly accessing software, computer power, and files over the Web instead of on their desktops.
The paper on "Above the Clouds: A View of Cloud Computing" is a short and detailed collection of topics related to Cloud Computing for those who wants to see the glimpse of Clouds, by clarifying terms, providing simple figures to quantify comparisons between of cloud and conventional Computing, and identifying the top technical and non-technical obstacles and opportunities of Cloud Computing.
DISCUSSION
When the services are delivered over the internet through any application/program that is supported by hardware and system software in the data center. This process is referred to as Cloud computing. And the services themselves are called Software as a Service (SaaS). Similarly, the data center is what we will call a Cloud. Now when these clouds are made public to the user as a service in a pay-as-you-go manner, then we call these kinds of data center(cloud) public clouds and the service being sold is Utility Computing. For a cloud to be private, the data center that provides the service should be an internal resource that is only for a business or organization. Thus, Generally, you could say Cloud Computing is the sum of SaaS and Utility Computing but does not include Private Clouds.
Users that use the cloud service are called "Cloud User or Software as a Service Provider" and those users who get the service through web applications are called the SaaS users.
One could argue that excluding private clouds from the definition defeats the purpose of having "Cloud" and can bring some confusion and skepticism in the field of Cloud computing and therefore. For a cloud to fall into the category of CC, the following advantage must be there:
- The illusion of infinite computing resources available on demand
- Elimination of an up-front commitment by Cloud users
- Ability to pay for use of computing resources on a short-term basis as needed
- Economies of scale due to very large data centers.
For a small scale private cloud, the advantages seem relevant, however, for a large company with thousands of machines like Google, Amazon, Microsoft. Private clouds could only have none or few of the advantages of Cloud Computing. Thus, ruling out private computing, but the idea of hybrid computing gives the benefits of agility by adapting and changing direction quickly is a core principle to the private Cloud. One example of it is the Amazon EC2.
It is also no fact that cloud computing has brought along numerous potential advantages that can guide the development and scaling of ideas, projects, and businesses to a better future. With it comes Obstacles and Opportunities in cloud computing. The paper describes in detail these Obstacles along with Opportunities in 10 points.
Most of the business or organization that uses cloud worry about the fact that their business is just hanging on a single thread of cloud service provider, and therefore one these 10 obstacles is Availability/Business Continuity. The high availability computing community has long followed the mantra "no single source of failure," yet the management of a Cloud Computing service by a single company is in fact a single point of failure. As a result, there's an opportunity for companies to provide cloud service to the customer instead of one single-source provider.
Times and often, business/organization has to move from one cloud to another which can because of multiple reasons. However, the highlighting point of this process is that the transition between one cloud to another can be a nightmare of its own and difficult and costly, making customers more dependent (locked-in) on a single cloud storage solution. This leads us to an opportunity for us to standardize the APIs so that a SaaS developer could deploy services and data across multiple Cloud Computing providers so that the failure of a single company would not take all copies of customer data with it.
Data security in an organization is one of the most crucial parts. And it is often questioned by the cloud service provider about data Confidentiality/Auditability. The security issues involved in protecting clouds from outside threats are similar to those already facing large data centers. The primary security mechanism in today's clouds is virtualization. This is a powerful defense and protects against most attempts by users to attack one another or the underlying cloud infrastructure.
As the traffic of the application using the cloud service increases, data management and transfer can become an important issue to talk about since handling large amounts of data by clouds can affect the cost to increase. One opportunity to overcome the high cost of Internet transfers is to ship disks. Jim Gray found that the cheapest way to send a lot of data is to ship disks or even whole computers
Similarly, not all cloud services are well performed which can cause performance Unpredictability while using these services. One opportunity is to improve architectures and operating systems to efficiently virtualize interrupts and I/O channels.
With an increase in users, the storage data also increases which despite the appeal of CC to give the illusion of infinite capacity the problem with storage is its rigid behavior toward scalability. Adding on it, the possibility of scaling quickly is also something that obstructs growth as the cloud should have the capacity to do it on demand and as you pay where machine learning can be used to check and monitor the growth.
And Not only that but one of the difficult challenges in Cloud Computing is removing errors in these very large scale distributed systems that often give an opportunity to have reliance on virtual machines in Cloud Computing.
When a business is using cloud service, the reputation of the matter of the cloud and One customer's bad behavior can affect the reputation of other customers using the same cloud. Amazon SES( Simple email service) keeps their service locked in sandbox mode to keep the reputation of the brand unless the Cloud user requests for the production model which is verified before allowing it.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, The era of cloud computing is growing more now than ever, but along with it comes many obstacles and opportunities for service providers and takers. Cloud Computing is a popular topic for blogging and white papers and has been featured in the title of workshops, conferences, and even magazines which is why it is important more than ever to learn and understand.
Referred Paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200045935_Above_the_Clouds_A_Berkeley_View_of_Cloud_Computing