Enterprise Cloud Computing for Non-Engineers

Frank M. Groom, Stephan S. Jones, Frank M. Groom, Stephan S. Jones

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138106215
• eBook ISBN: 9781351049207
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatica
• Subtopic: Informatica generale

This book provides a technical description of cloud computing technologies, covering cloud infrastructure and platform services. It then addresses the basics of operating a Cloud computing data center, the services offered from Cloud providers, the carrier role in connecting users to data centers, and the process of interconnecting Cloud data centers to form a flexible processing unit. It also describes how cloud computing has made an impact in various industries and provides emerging technologies that are critical within each industry. Lastly, this book will address security requirements and provide the best practices in securing data.

Chapter 1
The Basics of Cloud Computing

Frank M. Groom

Ball State University

Contents

Cloud Computing Services

Introduction

Drivers, Characteristics, and Benefits of Cloud Computing

The Essential Characteristics of Cloud Computing

The Advantages of Employing Cloud Services

Contracting for Cloud Services

Services Offerings

IaaS

PaaS

SaaS—Software-as-a-Service

Some Deployment Models for Offering Those Cloud Services

Public Cloud Service Offerings

Private Cloud Service Offerings

A Hybrid Approach

Changing the Cost Incurred for Providing Data Processing

The Required Cloud Computing Infrastructure

Systems That Make the Cloud Work

Vendor Virtualization Software

Employing Automation, User Portals, and Racks of Commodity Components

Automate Everything

The Customer Portal

The Cloud Data Center Management Portal

Reducing Costs by Employing Inexpensive Commodity Equipment

Virtualizing of All Aspects of the Cloud Data Center for Cost Effective Cloud Service Delivery

Each Cloud Data Center Computer Has a Super Operating System: The Hypervisor

The Hypervisor

Docker Containers: A Streamlined Alternative to VM Hypervisor Virtualization

Virtualizing the Hypervisor’s and Cloud Data Center’s Networking

Software Defined Network Connection with Cloud Data Centers

Interconnecting VMs and Containers across Distant Data Centers

Virtualizing Storage

Using Hadoop and MapReduce to Analyze Big Data across Multiple Processors

Factors Contributing to Cost Effectiveness

Conclusion

References

Cloud Computing Services

Introduction

The enormous cost of constructing, operating, maintaining, upgrading, and growing a corporate data center has led to the desire to create cheaper and more flexible shared processing centers that can provide on-demand services that meet dynamically changing (elastic) user requirements. This concept emerged with the outsourcing of corporate data center operations to companies such as IBM and the building of disaster recovery data centers for shared use by companies such as SUN. This concept of outsourcing corporate data processing of applications followed by the ability to isolate their operation in a shared usage environment has grown rapidly across the United States and globally, allowing major corporations, sections of the federal and state governments, and individuals to move their processing to virtualized data centers (VDCs) that can host the processing of a large number of clients. Furthermore, the enormous growth in social media and pervasive use of portable devices to interconnect people with each other and their personal and business data has further pressured data center providers to rapidly implement a more affordable model for processing, storage, networking, and even desktop application usage on less expensive, commodity rack-mounted X86-based Xeon servers. This new model of data center operation is termed cloud computing since the user has very little idea where and how their data is stored and processed—thus it is in the “cloud.”

To provide cloud computing services requires a process of abstracting the computing through the process of virtualization. A new layer of software sits between each operating system (OS), its supported applications, and the computer hardware. That new software is called a hypervisor which allows multiple applications and the OSs that run them to be placed on a shared use computer. That set of applications and their OS are packaged as a unit which is termed a Virtual Machine (VM). Each VM’s applications and their OS have access to the hosting computer’s hardware by means of the overall manager of this environment, the hypervisor, which acts as the overall OS for the hardware. All hosted VMs must execute through the hypervisor’s Kernel to use the hardware of the physical computer that hosts them.

Furthermore, in our mobile world, cloud computing also enables a standard desktop computing service and application to be extracted from the user’s device and placed in a cloud computing data center where other workers and social friends with portable devices can access them. This process allows users with their smart mobile phones and tablets to have the power of an office computer while maintaining the small size, mobility, and portability of that intelligent mobile device. Pools of data storage can be created at the cloud data centers to provide on-demand storage services, which can grow and shrink as the moment-by-moment needs of the user occur.

Before discussing the complete cloud infrastructure and service management, it is important to understand the concept of cloud computing in more detail, including its characteristics, benefits, services, and deployment models (NIST, 2011).

Operating these virtual data centers (VDC) provides flexibility, improved resource utilization, and ease of management compared to the operation of traditional data centers, enabling them to operate more effectively (Wu, 2015).

An example of such cloud computing is Amazon’s EC2 Cloud Services offering. Where in the past an organization might have grown its requirements and costs beyond standard large mainframe processing and begin to consider distributing processing over a large number of midrange or smaller servers, they can now purchase the equivalent of up to 1,000 instances of such servers from Amazon to run their mission-critical business applications. Amazon provides service agreements guaranteeing their service offering will meet the required service levels necessary to support the client-company operations and meet the customer expectations of that client–company purchasing these cloud processing services.

Drivers, Characteristics, and Benefits of Cloud Computing

The conversion of traditional computing environments to virtualized environments has also enabled the movement of various organizations to offer cloud computing services to government agencies, large and small businesses, and even special services to individuals. Virtualizing a computing environment means that the various hardware and the software resources are managed as a pool, providing improved utilization of resources. The objectives of virtualization are to centralize management; provide services on standard, lower cost, commodity equipment (processors, network switches, and storage); optimize resources by over-subscribing customer requirements to them; and then managing the available computing and storage capacity so efficiently among the users and their applications that the ebbs and flows of individual requirements offset each other and conserve total overall requirements (IBM, 2017b).

The companies’ desire to reduce their capital expenditures while controlling their expenses has triggered a number of companies to offer remote cloud computing services on a pay-as-you-use basis which is accessed over a network, usually the public Internet. Service oriented architecture is a popular service business that processes client application software and stores client data. Cloud computing centers provide a collection of services on a for-use basis. These can include running a set of pre-packaged applications and operating the clients own private applications. The available packaged applications can be offered across many business domains as a set of services and may also be shared by many clients (Zaigham & Puttini, 2013).

The following sections cover the fundamentals, service management, migration strategy, and security aspects of cloud computing.

The Essential Characteristics of Cloud Computing

The infrastructure for cloud computing has six essential characteristics.

1. On-Demand Services: Customers of cloud computing can request services on-demand, arrange those services as they need them, and expand or contract them as the business needs evolve.
2. Services Catalog: Customers can pick required services from a prearranged catalog of such services. The selected offerings from a cloud data center are then accessed by means of the Internet from an array of devices including desktops, laptops, tablets, iPads, or smartphones.
3. Internet Access: Traditionally, users have to install software packages, such as Microsoft Word or Microsoft PowerPoint, in order to use them. If the user is away from the computer where the software is installed this software is no longer available for usage. However, now much of the required software used can be accessed over the Internet. Free Internet versions of common software such as web-based Google Docs allows users to access and edit documents from any device which has Internet connection, thus eliminating the need to have access to a particular office-based computer device.
4. Dynamic Allocation: Cloud-based resources, both processing and storage, can be automatically and dynamically allocated, expanded, and contracted quickly and efficiently without interruption of service. When users experience large fluctuations in their required capacity, they can request that the cloud center temporarily increase the number of application servers and storage arrays for the duration of a specific task or for a specified period of time, and then contract when the demand subsides. The customer only pays for the actual capacity as it is used and not for any standby capacity that might be reserved in case of temporary need.
5. Metered Service: The cloud computing services providers keep track of the actual customer usage with a metered service system. They then provide billing and chargeback information for the Cloud resource used by each consumer with a detailed usage file available for customer inquiry. The metering software continuously monitors used CPU time, bandwidth, and storage capacity and regularly provides reports concerning that usage to the consumer along with the billing. Thus, the users avoid the large capital expenditures and operating expenses associated with running their own data center and pay only usage expenses for the services delivered by the cloud computing provider.
6. Rapid Elasticity: When organizations need to rapidly expand their business and computing capacity to support those increased operations, cloud computing services quickly accommodates such requirements without the need to raise capital and purchase additional equipment. The customer merely needs to request expanded facilities and the cloud vendor allocates those facilities from their pool of resources and monitors and bills accordingly.

The Advantages of Employing Cloud Services

Cloud computing offers a number of advantages to a customer when compared to the cost of operating their own data center or data centers, staffing the operation, purchasing and deploying the equipment, maintaining that equipment, and then powering, cooling, and protecting it. In contrast, contracting for cloud computing services provides the following advantages (Hamdaqa, 2012):

1. Reduced IT Cost: Cloud services can be purchased on an as-used basis. Consumers can avoid the large amount of up-front capital costs and associated operating expenses with no capital expenditure for equipment required. Consumers of cloud services can leverage the cloud service provider’s infrastructure while avoiding the ongoing expenses for running a data center; these include the cost of power, cooling, management, construction of buildings, and purchasing of real estate. Consumers pay only for that portion of the costs that they actually consume.
2. Business Agility Support: The speed at which new computing capacity can be provisioned is a vital element of cloud computing. These providers can reduce the time required to provision equipment and deploy new applications and services from months to minutes for the consumer. Cloud computing allows organizations to react more quickly to market conditions and enables the cloud operators to scale up and scale down the provided resources as required by individual customers.
3. F...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Editors
• Contributors
• 1 The Basics of Cloud Computing
• 2 Carrier Role in Cloud Computing Connectivity
• 3 Healthcare Industry
• 4 Manufacturing
• 5 Cloud Marketing
• 6 Government Agencies: Making the Case for the Cloud in State Government
• 7 The Internet of Things
• 8 Customer Services
• 9 A Movement Toward SaaS and the Cloud: The Evolution of IT Services in Higher Education
• 10 Implementation and Benefits of Cloud Services in Higher Education
• 11 Cloud Use in Consulting Services
• 12 Publishing: The Case for the Cloud in Publishing
• 13 Telecommunications: A Race for Survival: Cloud in the Mobile Carrier Industry
• 14 Call Centers Cloud Use in Call Centers
• 15 Security: Strategies for Security in the Cloud
• 16 Ontario Cloud: Contact Savvy—Launching A Multi-Cloud Solution
• Index