CHAPTER-1

Cloud Computing Fundamentals

William Voorsluys, James Broberg,
and Rajkumar Buyya, Borko Furht

Prepared by: Dr. Faramarz Safi

Islamic Azad University, Najafabad Branch,
Esfahan, Iran.
Introduction
Cloud computing can be defined as a new style of computing in
which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are
provided as a services over the Internet. Cloud computing has
become a significant technology trend, and many experts expect that
cloud computing will reshape information technology (IT) processes
and the IT marketplace. With the cloud computing technology, users
use a variety of devices, including PCs, laptops, smartphones, and
PDAs to access programs, storage, and application-development
platforms over the Internet, via services offered by cloud computing
providers. Advantages of the cloud computing technology include cost
savings, high availability, and easy scalability.
Introduction
Figure 1.1, adapted from Voas and Zhang (2009), shows six phases of
computing paradigms, from dummy terminals/mainframes, to PCs,
networking computing, to grid and cloud computing.
In phase 1, many users shared powerful mainframes using dummy
terminals.
In phase 2, stand-alone PCs became powerful enough to meet the
majority of users’ needs.
In phase 3, PCs, laptops, and servers were connected together
through local networks to share resources and increase performance.
In phase 4, local networks were connected to other local networks
forming a global network such as the Internet to utilize remote
applications and resources.
In phase 5, grid computing provided shared computing power and
storage through a distributed computing system.
In phase 6, cloud computing further provides shared resources on the
Internet in a scalable and simple way.

Comparing these six computing paradigms, it looks like that cloud

computing is a return to the original mainframe computing paradigm.
However, these two paradigms have several important differences.
Mainframe computing offers finite computing power, while cloud
computing provides almost infinite power and capacity. Fig. 1.1 Six computing paradigms – from
In addition, in mainframe computing, dummy terminals acted as user mainframe computing to Internet computing, to grid
interface devices, while in cloud computing powerful PCs can provide computing and cloud computing (adapted from
local computing power and cashing support. Voas and Zhang (2009))
Enabling Technologies
Convergence of Various Advances Leading to the Advent of Cloud Computing
 Enabling Technologies
virtualization
• The advantage of cloud computing is
the ability to virtualize and share
resources among different
applications with the objective for
better server utilization.

• In non-cloud computing three

independent platforms exist for three
different applications running on its
own server.

• In the cloud, servers can be shared,

or virtualized, for operating systems
and applications resulting in fewer Fig. 1.6 An example of virtualization: in non-
servers (in specific example two cloud computing there is a need for
servers). three servers; in the cloud computing, two
servers are used (adapted from Jones)
 Enabling Technologies
Virtualization
• The idea of virtualizing a computer system’s resources, including processors,
memory, and I/O devices has been well established for decades, aiming at
improving, sharing and utilization of computer systems.
• Hardware virtualization allows running multiple operating systems and software
stacks on a single physical platform. A software layer, the virtual machine monitor
(VMM), also called a hypervisor, mediates access to the physical hardware
presenting to each guest operating system a virtual machine (VM), which is a set
of several innovative technologies multi-core chips, Para-virtualization,
hardware-assisted virtualization, and live migration of VMs has contributed to
an increasing adoption of virtualization on server systems.
• Researches and practitioners have been emphasizing three basic capabilities
regarding management of workload in a virtualized system, namely isolation,
consolidation, and migration.
• Workload isolation is achieved since all program instructions are fully confined
inside a VM, which leads to improvements in security.
• Better reliability is also achieved because software failures inside one VM do not
affect others.
• Moreover, better performance control is attained since execution of one VM
should not affect the performance of another VM.
 Enabling Technologies
Virtualization
• The consolidation of several individual and heterogeneous workloads onto a single
physical platform leads to better system utilization.
• This practice is also employed for overcoming potential software and hardware
incompatibilities in case of upgrades, given that it is possible to run legacy and new
operation systems concurrently.
• Workload migration, also referred to as application mobility, targets at facilitating hardware
maintenance, load balancing, and disaster recovery. It is done by encapsulating a guest OS
state within a VM and allowing it to be suspended, fully serialized, migrated to a different
platform, and resumed immediately or preserved to be restored at a later date [22].
• A VM’s state includes a full disk or partition image, configuration files, and an image of
its RAM.
 Enabling Technologies
virtualization
A number of VM platforms exist that are the basis of many utility or cloud computing
environments. The most notable ones, VMWare, Xen, and KVM, are outlined in the following
sections.
• VMWare ESXi is a pioneer in the virtualization market. Its ecosystem of tools ranges from
server and desktop virtualization to high-level management tools. ESXi is a VMM from VMWare.
It provides advanced virtualization techniques of processor, memory, and I/O. Especially,
through memory ballooning and page sharing, it can overcommit memory, thus increasing the
density of VMs inside a single physical server.

• Xen. The Xen hypervisor started as an open-source project and has served as a base to other
virtualization products, both commercial and open-source. It has pioneered the para-
virtualization concept, on which the guest operating system, by means of a specialized
kernel, can interact with the hypervisor, thus significantly improving performance. In
addition to an open-source distribution, Xen currently forms the base of commercial hypervisors
of a number of vendors, most notably Citrix Xen Server and Oracle VM.

• KVM. The kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) is a Linux virtualization subsystem. It has
been part of the mainline Linux kernel since version 2.6.20, thus being natively supported by
several distributions. In addition, activities such as memory management and scheduling are
carried out by existing kernel features, thus making KVM simpler and smaller than hypervisors
that take control of the entire machine. KVM leverages hardware-assisted virtualization,
which improves performance and allows it to support unmodified guest operating
systems; currently, it supports several versions of Windows, Linux, and UNIX.
Enabling Technologies
Web service and service-oriented architecture, service flows and workflows, and
Web 2.0 and mash-up.
Web Service and Service Oriented Architecture:
• Web services (WS) open standards has significantly contributed to advances in the domain of
software integration. Web services can 1) Glue together applications running on different
messaging product platforms, 2) Enabling information from one application to be made
available to others, and 3) enabling internal applications to be made available over the
Internet.
• A rich WS software stack has been specified and standardized, resulting in a multitude of
technologies to describe, compose, and orchestrate services, package and transport
messages between services, publish and discover services, represent quality of service
(QoS) parameters, and ensure security in service access.
• WS standards have been created on top of existing ubiquitous technologies such as HTTP and
XML, thus providing a common mechanism for delivering services. The purpose of a SOA is to
address requirements of loosely coupled, standards-based, and protocol-independent
distributed computing.
• In a SOA, software resources are packaged as “services,” that provide standard business
functionality and are independent of the state or context of other services. Services are described in
a standard definition language (WSDL) and have a published interface (UDDI).
• The advent of Web 2.0. information and services may be programmatically aggregated, acting as
building blocks of complex compositions, called service mashups (Web Service Composition).
i.e. an enterprise application that follows the SOA paradigm is a collection of services that together
perform complex business logic.
Enabling Technologies
Web service and service-oriented architecture, service flows and workflows, and
Web 2.0 and mash-up.
• Many service providers, such as Amazon, del.icio.us, Facebook, and Google, make
their service APIs publicly accessible using standard protocols such as SOAP and
REST [14]. Consequently, one can put an idea of a fully functional Web application into
practice just by gluing pieces with few lines of code.

• For example, programmable Web-2 is a public repository of service APIs and mashups
currently listing thousands of APIs and mashups. Popular APIs such as Google Maps,
Flickr, YouTube, Amazon e-Commerce, and Twitter, when combined, produce a variety
of interesting solutions, from finding video game retailers to weather maps. Similarly,
Salesforce.com’s offers AppExchange, which enables the sharing of solutions
developed by third-party developers on top of Salesforce.com components.

• In the Software as a Service (SaaS) domain, cloud applications can be built as

compositions of other services from the same or different providers. Services such as
user authentication, e-mail, payroll management, and calendars are examples of
building blocks that can be reused and combined in a business solution.
 Enabling Technologies
Grid Computing
• Grid computing enables aggregation of distributed resources and transparently
access to them. Most production grids such as TeraGrid and EGEE seek to share
compute and storage resources distributed across different administrative domains, with
their main focus being speeding up a broad range of scientific applications, such as
climate modeling, drug design, and protein analysis.

• A key aspect of the grid vision realization has been building standard Web services-
based protocols that allow distributed resources to be “discovered, accessed,
allocated, monitored, accounted for, and billed for, etc., and in general managed as
a single virtual system.”

• The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) addresses this need for standardization
by defining a set of core capabilities and behaviors that address key concerns in grid
systems.

• Globus Toolkit is a middleware that implements several standard Grid services and over
the years has aided the deployment of several service-oriented Grid infrastructures and
applications. An ecosystem of tools is available to interact with service grids, including
grid brokers, which facilitate user interaction with multiple middleware and implement
policies to meet QoS needs. The development of standardized protocols for several grid
computing activities has contributed—theoretically—to allow delivery of on-demand
computing services over the Internet.
 Enabling Technologies
Grid Computing
However, ensuring QoS in grids has been perceived as a difficult endeavor.

• Lack of performance isolation has prevented grids adoption in a variety of scenarios, especially on
environments where resources are oversubscribed or users are uncooperative. Activities
associated with one user or virtual organization (VO) can influence, in an uncontrollable way,
the performance perceived by other users using the same platform. Therefore, the
impossibility of enforcing QoS and guaranteeing execution time became a problem, especially
for time-critical applications.

• Another issue that has lead to frustration when using grids is the availability of resources with
diverse software configurations, including disparate operating systems, libraries, compilers,
runtime environments, and so forth. At the same time, user applications would often run only on
specially customized environments.

• Consequently, a portability barrier has often been present on most grid infrastructures, inhibiting
users of adopting grids as utility computing environments.

• Virtualization technology is the perfect fit to issues that have caused frustration when using
grids, such as hosting many dissimilar software applications on a single physical platform. In
this direction, some research projects (e.g., Globus Virtual Workspaces ) aimed at evolving grids to
support an additional layer to virtualize computation, storage, and network resources.
 Enabling Technologies
Utility Computing
• With increasing popularity and usage, large grid installations have faced new
problems, such as excessive demands for resources coupled with strategic and
adversarial behavior by users.

• Initially, grid resource management techniques did not ensure fair and equitable
access to resources in many systems. Traditional metrics (throughput, waiting
time, and slowdown) failed to capture the more subtle requirements of users.
There were no real incentives for users to be flexible about resource
requirements or job deadlines, nor provisions to accommodate users with
urgent work.

• In utility computing environments, users assign a “utility” value to their jobs,

where utility is a fixed or time-varying valuation that captures various QoS
constraints (deadline, importance, satisfaction). The valuation is the amount
they are willing to pay a service provider to satisfy their demands. The
service providers then attempt to maximize their own utility, it means utility may
directly correlate with their profit.
 Enabling Technologies
Autonomic Computing
• The increasing complexity of computing systems has motivated research on
autonomic computing, which seeks to improve systems by decreasing human
involvement in their operation. In other words, systems should manage themselves,
with high-level guidance from humans.

• Autonomic, or self-managing, systems rely on monitoring probes and gauges

(sensors), on an adaptation engine (autonomic manager) for computing optimizations
based on monitoring data, and on effectors to carry out changes on the system. IBM’s
Autonomic Computing Initiative has contributed to define the four properties of
autonomic systems: self-configuration, self-optimization, self-healing, and self-
protection. IBM has also suggested a reference model for autonomic control loops of
autonomic managers, called MAPE-K (Monitor Analyze Plan Execute-Knowledge).

• The large data centers of cloud computing providers must be managed in an

efficient way. In this sense, the concepts of autonomic computing inspire software
technologies for data center automation, which may perform tasks such as:
management of service levels of running applications; management of data
center capacity; proactive disaster recovery; and automation of VM
provisioning.
 Cloud Computing Features
Cloud computing brings a number of new features compared to other computing paradigms
(Wang et al., 2008; Grossman, 2009). There are briefly described in this section:

 Scalability and on-demand services:

Cloud computing provides resources and services for users on demand. The resources are
scalable over several data centers. To support this expectation, clouds must allow self-
service access so that customers can request, customize, pay, and use services without
intervention of human operators.
 User-centric interface:
Cloud interfaces are location independent and can be accesses by well established
interfaces such as Web services and Internet browsers.
 Guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) or Service Level Agreement (SLA):
Cloud computed can guarantee QoS for users in terms of hardware/CPU performance,
bandwidth, and memory capacity.
 Autonomous system:
The cloud computing systems are autonomous systems managed transparently to users.
However, software and data inside clouds can be automatically reconfigured and
consolidated to a simple platform depending on user’s needs.
 Cloud Computing Features
 Per-usage Metering and Billing
Cloud computing eliminates up-front commitment by users, allowing them to request and
use only the necessary amount. Services must be priced on a short term basis (e.g., by the
hour), allowing users to release (and not pay for) resources as soon as they are not needed.
For these reasons, clouds must implement features to allow efficient trading of service such
as pricing, accounting, and billing. Metering should be done accordingly for different types of
service (e.g., storage, processing, and bandwidth) and usage promptly reported, thus
providing greater transparency.
 Elasticity
Cloud computing gives the illusion of infinite computing resources available on demand.
Therefore users expect clouds to rapidly provide resources in any quantity at any time. In
particular, it is expected that the additional resources can be (a) provisioned, possibly
automatically, when an application load increases and (b) released when load
decreases (scale up and down).
 Customization
In a multi-tenant cloud a great disparity between user needs is often the case. Thus,
resources rented from the cloud must be highly customizable. In the case of infrastructure
services, customization means allowing users to deploy specialized virtual appliances and to
be given privileged (root) access to the virtual servers. Other service classes (PaaS and
SaaS) offer less flexibility and are not suitable for general-purpose computing, but still are
expected to provide a certain level of customization.
Layers and Types of Cloud Computing
 Layers and Types of Cloud Computing
• Cloud computing services are divided into three classes, according to the
abstraction level of the capability provided and the service model of
providers, namely:

(1) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS),

(2) Platform as a Service (PaaS),
(3) Software as a Service (SaaS).

• The reference model of Buyya et al. explains the role of each layer in an
integrated architecture. A core middleware manages physical resources
and the VMs deployed on top of them; in addition, it provides the required
features (e.g., accounting and billing) to offer multi-tenant pay-as-you-go
services.
• Cloud development environments are built on top of infrastructure services
to offer application development and deployment capabilities. In this level,
various programming models, libraries, APIs, and mashup editors enable the
creation of a range of business, Web, and scientific applications. Once
deployed in the cloud, these applications can be consumed by end users.
Layers and Types of Cloud Computing
Infrastructure as a Service
• Offering virtualized resources (computation, storage, and communication) on
demand is known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Infrastructure
services are considered to be the bottom layer of cloud computing systems.

• Amazon web services offers IaaS, which in the case of EC2 service means
offering VMs with a software stack that can be customized similar to how an
ordinary physical server would be customized. Users are given privileges to
perform numerous activities to the server, such as: starting and stopping it,
customizing it by installing software packages, attaching virtual disks to it, and
configuring access permissions and firewall rules.
 Layers of Cloud Computing
Platform as a Service
• It offers a higher level of abstraction to make a cloud easily programmable, known
as Platform as a Service (PaaS). It provides Integrated Development Environment
(IDE) including data security, backup and recovery, application hosting, and
scalable architecture.

• A Cloud platform offers an environment on which developers create and deploy

applications and do not necessarily need to know how many processors or
how much memory that applications will be using. In addition, multiple
programming models and specialized services (e.g., data access, authentication,
and payments) are offered as building blocks to new applications.

• Google AppEngine, an example of PaaS, offers a scalable environment for

developing and hosting Web applications, which should be written in specific
programming languages such as Python or Java, and use the services’ own
proprietary structured object data store. Building blocks include an in-memory
object cache (memcache), mail service, instant messaging service (XMPP), image
manipulation service, and integration with Google Accounts authentication service.
Layers of Cloud Computing
Platform as a Service

Fig. 1.3 The concept of Platform-as-a-Service, Zoho Creator

(adapted from “Platform as a Service,” http://www.zoho.com/creator/paas.html)
 Layers of Cloud Computing
Software as a Service
Applications reside on the top of the cloud stack. Services in this layer
are accessed through Web Portals. Consumers are increasingly
shifting from locally installed computer systems to online software
services that offer the same functionality.

Traditional desktop applications such as word processing and

spreadsheet can now be accessed as a service in the web. It
alleviates the burden of software maintenance for customers and
simplifies development and testing providers.

Salesforce.com, which relies on SaaS model, offers business

productivity applications (CRM) that reside completely on their
servers, allowing customers to customize and access applications on
demand.
Layers of Cloud Computing
Software as a Service - According to Chappell (2008)
• Figure 1.4a shows the cloud service SaaS, where
the entire application is running in the cloud. The
client contains a simple browser to access the
application. A well-known example of SaaS is
salesforce.com.
• Figure 1.4b illustrates another type of cloud
services, where the application runs on the client;
however, it accesses useful functions and services
provided in the cloud. An example of this type of
cloud services on the desktop is Apple’s iTunes.
The desktop application plays music, while the
cloud service is used to purchase a new audio and
video content. An enterprise example of this cloud
service is Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services.
On-premises Exchange Server is using added
services from the cloud including spam filtering,
archiving, and other functions.
• Finally, Fig. 1.4c shows a cloud platform for
creating applications, which is used by
developers. The application developers create a
new SaaS application using the cloud platform.
 Types of Cloud Computing
Deployment Models - (“Cloud Computing,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing)

• There are three types of cloud computing: Three deployment types of cloud computing
(a) public cloud, (b) private cloud, and (c) hybrid cloud

• public cloud (or external cloud): computing

resources are dynamically provisioned over the Internet
via Web applications or Web services from an off-site
third-party provider. Public clouds are run by third
parties, and applications from different customers are
likely to be mixed together on the cloud’s servers,
storage systems, and networks.
• Private cloud (or internal cloud): refers to cloud
computing on private networks. Private clouds are built
for the exclusive use of one client, providing full control
over data, security, and quality of service. Private
clouds can be built and managed by a company’s own
IT organization or by a cloud provider.
• A hybrid cloud environment combines multiple
public and private cloud models. Hybrid clouds
introduce the complexity of determining how to
distribute applications across both a public and private
cloud.
Public Cloud and Infrastructure Services
• There are many examples for vendors who publicly provide infrastructure as
a service. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)[4] , but the market now
bristles with lots of competition like GoGrid, Joyent Accelerator, Rackspace,
AppNexus, FlexiScale, and Manjrasoft Aneka.

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services can be leveraged via Web
services (SOAP or REST), a Web-based AWS (Amazon Web Service)
management console, or the EC2 command line tools.
• The Amazon service provides hundreds of pre-made AMIs (Amazon
Machine Images) with a variety of operating systems (i.e., Linux, Open
Solaris, or Windows) and pre-loaded software.
• It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets
you run on Amazon’s computing and infrastructure environment easily.
• It also reduces the time required for obtaining and booting a new server’s
instances to minutes, thereby allowing a quick scalable capacity and
resources, up and down, as the computing requirements change.
• Amazon offers different instances’ size according to (a) the resources’ needs
(small, large, and extra large), (b) the high CPU’s needs it provides (medium
and extra large high CPU instances), and (c) high-memory instances (extra
large, double extra large, and quadruple extra large instance).
Private cloud and Infrastructure Services
A private cloud aims at providing public cloud functionality, but on private resources, while
maintaining control over an organization’s data and resources to meet security and governance’s
requirements in an organization.
Private cloud exhibits a highly virtualized cloud data center located inside your organization’s
firewall. It may also be a private space dedicated for your company within a cloud vendor’s data
center designed to handle the organization’s workloads, and in this case it is called Virtual
Private Cloud (VPC). Private clouds exhibit the following characteristics:

1) Allow service provisioning and compute capability for an organization’s users in a self-
service manner.
2) Automate and provide well-managed virtualized environments.
3) Optimize computing resources, and servers’ utilization.
3) Support specific workloads.
There are many examples for vendors and frameworks that provide infrastructure as a service in
private setups. The best-known examples are Eucalyptus and OpenNebula (which will be
covered in more detail later on).
4) It is also important to highlight a third type of cloud setup named “hybrid cloud,” in which a
combination of private/internal and external cloud resources exist together by enabling outsourcing
of noncritical services and functions in public cloud and keeping the critical ones internal.
Hybrid cloud’s main function is to release resources from a public cloud and to handle sudden
demand usage, which is called “cloud bursting.”
 Types of Cloud Computing
Deployment Models
Armbrust et al. propose definitions for public cloud as a “cloud made available in a
pay-as-you-go manner to the general public” and private cloud as “internal data
center of a business or other organization, not made available to the general
public.”

In most cases, establishing a private cloud means restructuring an existing

infrastructure by adding virtualization and cloud-like interfaces. This allows users to
interact with the local data center while experiencing the same advantages of public
clouds, most notably self-service interface, privileged access to virtual servers, and
per-usage metering and billing.

A community cloud is “shared by several organizations and supports a specific

community that has shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements,
policy, and compliance considerations).”
A hybrid cloud takes shape when a private cloud is supplemented with computing
capacity from public clouds.

The approach of temporarily renting capacity to handle spikes in load is known as

“cloud-bursting”.
Cloud Computing Versus Cloud Services
(Jens, 2008)
Cloud computing is the IT foundation for cloud services and it consists
of technologies that enable cloud services.
Cloud Computing Features
Cloud Computing Standards
Cloud computing standards have not been yet fully developed; however, a
number of existing typically lightweight, open standards have facilitated the
growth of cloud computing:
(“Cloud Computing,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing).
Cloud Management
Cloud Infrastructure Management
A key challenge IaaS providers face when:

• building a cloud infrastructure is managing physical and virtual resources, namely servers, storage,
and networks, in a holistic fashion.
• The orchestration of resources must be performed in a way to rapidly and dynamically provision
resources to applications.

• The software toolkit responsible for this orchestration is called a virtual infrastructure manager
(VIM). This type of software resembles a traditional operating system, but instead of dealing with a
single computer, it aggregates resources from multiple computers, presenting a uniform view to
user and applications. The term “cloud operating system”, “infrastructure sharing software”, and
“virtual infrastructure engine.” are used to realize this toolkit. Sotomayor et al. present two
categories of tools to manage clouds:
• The first category—cloud toolkits—includes those that “expose a remote and secure
interface for creating, controlling and monitoring virtualize resources,” but do not specialize in VI
management.
• Tools in the second category—the virtual infrastructure managers—provide advanced
features such as automatic load balancing and server consolidation, but do not expose remote
cloud-like interfaces.
Cloud Management
Cloud Infrastructure Management – Features and Case studies
Features: Case Studies:

• Virtualization Support • Apache VCL

• Self-Service • AppLogic
• Citrix Essentials
• On-Demand Resource Provisioning
• Enomaly ECP
• Multiple Backend Hypervisors • Eucalyptus
• Storage Virtualization • Nimbus3
• Interface to Public Clouds • OpenNebula
• Virtual Networking • OpenPEX
• oVirt
• Dynamic Resource Allocation
• Platform ISF
• Virtual Clusters • VMWare vSphere and vCloud
• Reservation and Negotiation Mechanism
• High Availability and Data Recovery
Infrastructure as a service Providers
Features: Case Studies:
• Geographic Presence
• Amazon Web Services
• User Interface and Access to Servers
• Advanced Reservation of Capacity
• Automatic Scaling and Load
Balancing
• Service-Level Agreement
• Hypervisor and Operating System
Choice
Platform as a Service Providers
Features: Case Studies:
• Programming Models, Languages, • Aneka
and Frameworks • App Engine
• Persistence Options • Microsoft Azure
• Force.com
• Heroku
Cloud Computing Challenges and Risks
• Security, Privacy, and Trust
• Current cloud offerings are essentially public…exposing the system to more attacks
• Security and privacy affect the entire cloud computing stack, since there is a
massive use of third-party services and infrastructures that are used to host
important data or to perform critical operations.
• Legal and regulatory issues also need attention.
• When data are moved into the cloud, providers may choose to locate them anywhere on the
planet.
• The physical location of data centers determine the set of laws that can be applied to the
management of data. For instance, specific cryptography techniques cannot be used in some
countries. Similarly, country laws can impose that sensitive data such as patient health
records, are to be stored within national borders.
• Data Lock-in and Standardization
• Data might be locked-in by a certain provider
• Users may want to move data and applications out from a provider to another one.
• Current cloud computing infrastructures and platforms do not employ standard
methods of storing user data and applications; therefore, data are not portable.
• The answer to this challenge is open standards such as Unified Cloud Interface
(UCI), or Open Virtual Format (OVF).
Cloud Computing Challenges and Risks
• Availability, Fault-Tolerance, and Disaster Recovery
• Users expectations must be satisfied when they move to clouds. Expectations such as
availability of the service, overall performance, or what will happen if something goes
wrong in the system.
• Service Level Agreements (SLAs) include QoS requirements must be set up between
users and providers to act as warranty. Penalties for violating the expectations must also
be approved.
• Resource Management
• Physical resources such as CPU cores, disk space, and network bandwidth must be
sliced and shared among virtual machines.
• The multi-dimensional nature of VMs complicates finding a good mapping of VMs onto
available physical hosts.
• Dimensions to be considered: number of CPUs, amount of memory, size of virtual disks,
and network bandwidth.
• Dynamic VM mapping policies are easy ways of preempting low-priority allocations in
favor of high-priority ones.
• Migration of VMs, when to initiate migration? which VM? Where? Relocating datacenter
load, and there is a trade-off between negative impact of migration and stability of service.
• How much data must be travelled through space (i.e. migration), time (i.e., check-pointing
and rewinding), load balancing, backup and recovery.
• Dynamic provisioning of new VMs and replicating existing VMs require efficient
mechanism to make VM block storage devices (i.e., image files) quickly available at
selected hosts.
Cloud Computing Challenges and Risks
• Energy Efficiency
Cloud Computing Platforms
Pricing
Pricing for cloud platforms and services is based on three key dimensions:
(i) storage, (ii) bandwidth, and (iii) compute.

• Storage is typically measured as average daily amount of data stored in GB over a monthly
period.
• Bandwidth is measured by calculating the total amount of data transferred in and out of platform
service through transaction and batch processing. Generally, data transfer between services
within the same platform is free in many platforms.
• Compute is measured as the time units needed to run an instance, or application, or machine to
servicing requests. Table 6 compares pricing for three major cloud computing platforms.

• In summary, by analyzing the cost of cloud computing, depending on the application

characteristics the cost of deploying an application could vary based on the selected platform.
From Table 1.6, it seems that the unit pricing for three major platforms is quite similar. Besides
unit pricing, it is important to translate it into monthly application development, deployments and
maintenance costs.
Cloud Computing Platforms
Cloud Computing Components and Their Vendors
The main elements comprising cloud computing platforms include
computer hardware, storage, infrastructure, computer software,
operating systems, and platform virtualization. The leading vendors
providing cloud computing components are shown in Table 1.7
(“Cloud Computing,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing).
 Cloud Computing in the Future
In summary, cloud computing is definitely a
type of computing paradigm/architecture that
will remain for a long time to come.

In the near future, cloud computing can

emerge in various directions. One possible
scenario for the future is that an enterprise
may use a distributed hybrid cloud.

According to this scenario, the enterprise will

use the core applications on its private cloud,
while some other applications will be
distributed on several public/private clouds,
which are optimized for specific applications.