Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Cloud Computing

This page captures the brief view of cloud services

Following are some commonly used terms:
Cloud Computing (wikipedia)
Broadly, servers, virtualisation software, networking and storage are required to form cloud. Following components form a complete cloud:
· Scalable, powerful and cheap servers
· Integrated, virtualised, and hugely scalable storage
· Virtualised 10GbE network switching infrastructure
· Fibre Channel over Ethernet capability to link servers and storage across Ethernet
· Disaster recovery capabilities
· Service-quality tracking and control
· Management of a virtualised data centre
Cloud architecture was used by Web 2.0 but due to changing economies more enterprises are adopting it due to its pay-per-usage model. Virtualization enables cloud to offer more services than cloud could do without
virtualization, e.g. PaaS.
Private Cloud
Smaller cloud than a conventional one. It is cloud like IT systems within a firewall offering similar services, but
to a closed internal network. A private cloud can be expanded to contain resources from within an enterprize (on premise) as well as from external cloud (off premise).
Public Cloud
Cloud available to anyone over the internet. Examples are, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), IBM's Blue Cloud, Sun Cloud, Google AppEngine and Windows Azure Services Platform.
Service Provider
Entity providing cloud services to others.
Subscriber
Entity consuming a cloud service.
Cloud Services
There are various cloud services:
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) (wikipedia)
Service user gets infrastructure to run application without spending on hardware (saving CapEx),
e.g. a configured VM.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) (wikipedia)
Service user gets platform to develop/run applications on cloud without spending on cloud infrastructure, e.g. Azure, Google AppEngine, Force.com
Software as a Service (SaaS) (wikipedia)
Service user gets a software to use without spending on software license and hardware, e.g. eXpresso, Google Apps
Storage as a Service (STaaS)
Service user gets storage to use without spending on storage hardware, e.g. Synaptic, Mozy, Box.net, also T-systems, BT, etc offer storage services for enterprizes.
NOTE: Synaptic service is offered by AT&T, a telco. It makes perfect sense for a telco to offer such a service because they already have network to deliver the service. So, they can offer better value for money for the subscribers.

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