As this is the age of technology and every day we are receiving the news about growing popularity of internet and its applications. Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm of today that is rapidly accepted by the industry/organizations/educational institutions etc. for various applications and purpose. As computing is related to distributed and parallel computing which are from a very long time in the market, but today is the world of cloud computing that reduces the cost of computing by focusing on personal computing to data center computing. Cloud computing architecture and standard provide a unique way for delivering computation services to cloud users. It is having a simple API (Application Platform Interface) to users for accessing storage, platform and hardware by paying-as-per-use basis. Services provided by cloud computing is as same as other utility oriented services like electricity bill, water, telephone etc. over shared network. There are many cloud services providers in the market for providing services like Google, Microsoft, Manjrasoft Aneka, etc.
TopFundamental Concept
A type of computing in which demand services of a client like network, computing, and storage etc. are offered dynamically with the help of internet is known as cloud computing. A group of distributed servers is used to fulfill the demand of cloud users. Service provided by cloud computing includes shared resources, information, software, and applications etc. as per user requirements.
A conventional computer system that we are using is having a single operating system and all is system centric. Cloud computing uses standard and protocols of the network. It provides services that actually run on distributed computing server. Normally resources of cloud computing are virtual in nature. Cloud services are offered to the user on the basis of utility, users have to pay only that amount for which they have used the services. Mainly three types of services are provided by providers they are software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure as a service.
Cloud delivered the application as service to the end user with the help of internet and also offer hardware and platform in the datacenters for providing that services. Every service is on metered basis and users have not to investment more capital to get this service. Interface used for accessing the services is a web browser. Single hardware resource is easily accessible and shared by more than one user using virtualization software. This virtualization technology is used for better and full resource utilization. Figure 1 shows an overview of cloud computing where various cloud users can avail the services of cloud system simultaneously which consists of services like applications and platform, hardware resources, database, storage devices etc.
Figure 1. Overview of Cloud Computing
With very minimum effort large or even small size business can take ubiquitous services of cloud computing. Service level agreement (SLA) define various parameters of services which are going to delivered to the cloud users which are discussed between cloud provider and user before using any type of service. Service usage conditions are also expressed in SLA. Omnipresent storage and compute power on demand basis is the main reason for popularities of cloud computing. Computing resources that are easily accessible through cloud computing are networks, servers, storage, application etc.
Cloud computing system consists of basis components as:-
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Cloud consumers
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Datacenter
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Servers.
Cloud Consumers
Cloud users can use any of the interfaces to interact with cloud for managing and fetching various information and data. Generally users can use interface using Mobile, thin and thick client.
Mobile smart phone can be used by the cloud users which make cloud accessing easy with the presence of many tools to access the information. Thin clients can be used to display the information. These types of clients have no primary memory. Thin client is not very costly and consume very less power also. Thick clients can use various browsers for connecting with cloud.
Party those who are provided cloud services are called cloud providers and the user who consume that services are called cloud user or cloud client or cloud consumer. Cloud computing provide scaling feature to its users that means it is having the capability to increase or decrease IT resources as per the user need or demands.
An organization or an individual can be cloud consumers that have taken permission and have a formal agreement to remotely access the cloud IT resources from the cloud providers. Figure 2 shows cloud consumers of organization 1 and organization 2 who are using cloud services provided by cloud provider.