New Trends on RIAs Development

2. Rias And Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users do not need having knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the underlying infrastructure in the cloud that supports the services rendered to them. Cloud computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and, the hardware and systems software in the data centers that provide those services. The services themselves have been referred as SaaS whereas the underlying high-level systems software and the low-level hardware have been known as PaaS and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), respectively.

According to the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) (Mell & Grance, 2011), Cloud computing is composed of five essential characteristics: 1) on-demand self-service which is the consumer ability to unilaterally provision computing capabilities as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider, 2) broad network access which is the availability of computing capabilities over the network through standards mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous client platforms, 3) resource pooling which is the pooling of provider’s computing resources to serve multiple consumers by using a multi-tenant model, 4) rapid elasticity which is the ability to elastically provision and release computing capabilities, in some cases automatically, in order to rapidly commensurate with demand and 5) measured service which is the system ability to control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service.

Figure 1.

The Web evolution