Cloud Computing has become a hot topic for business applications. This paradigm has taken strength in the last year as many developers (especially those working on open-source platforms) are using the principles to build applications for business.
When I first heard about Cloud Computing, I learned more about it from the links cited below.
"Cloud computing is an emerging computing technology that uses the internet and central remote servers to maintain infrastructure, data and applications. Cloud computing allows consumers and businesses to use applications without installation and access their personal files at any computer with internet access."
"Cloud computing is a paradigm of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the "cloud" that supports them."
This technology allows for much more efficient computing by centralizing storage, memory, processing and bandwidth.
The Cloud computing concept generally incorporates combinations of the following:
Platform as a service (PaaS) is the "delivery of a computing platform and solution stack as a service. PaaS offerings include workflow facilities for application design, application development, testing, deployment and hosting as well as application services such as team collaboration, web service integration and marshalling, database integration, security, scalability, storage, persistence, state management, application versioning, application instrumentation and developer community facilitation."
Software as a service (SaaS) is a "model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. SaaS software vendors will host the application on their own servers or download the application to the consumer device, disabling it after use or after the on-demand contract expires. Much like any other software, Software as a Service can also take advantage of Service Oriented Architecture to enable software applications to communicate with each other. "
Key characteristics
Cloud computing customers do not generally own the physical infrastructure serving as host to the software platform in question. Instead, they avoid capital expenditure by renting usage from a third-party provider. They consume resources as a service and pay only for resources that they use.
(a) Cost is claimed to be greatly reduced and capital expenditure is converted to operational expenditure. This ostensibly lowers barriers to entry, as infrastructure is typically provided by a third-party and does not need to be purchased for one-time or infrequent intensive computing tasks. Pricing on a utility computing basis is fine-grained with usage-based options and fewer IT skills are required for implementation (in-house).
(b) Device and location independence enable users to access systems using a web browser regardless of their location or what device they are using (e.g., PC, mobile). As infrastructure is off-site (typically provided by a third-party) and accessed via the Internet, users can connect from anywhere.
(c) Reliability improves through the use of multiple redundant sites, which makes cloud computing suitable for business continuity and disaster recovery.
(d) Scalability via dynamic ("on-demand") provisioning of resources on a fine-grained, self-service basis near real-time, without users having to engineer for peak loads. Performance is monitored and consistent and loosely-coupled architectures are constructed using web services as the system interface.
(e) Security typically improves due to centralization of data, increased security-focused resources, etc., but concerns can persist about loss of control over certain sensitive data, and the lack of security for stored kernels. Security is often as good as or better than under traditional systems, in part because providers are able to devote resources to solving security issues that many customers cannot afford. Providers typically log accesses, but accessing the audit logs themselves can be difficult or impossible.
We at PAKRA, follow the principles of Cloud Computing in design and deployment of our applications.
References:
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment