What is Cloud Computing?
The cloud is an on-demand service or group of services hosted over the Internet. The cloud and its services have changed to adapt to customer needs. Dijiang Huang explains that Mobile Cloud Computing is the development and extension of cloud computing and mobile computing. It is the most emerging and well-accepted technology with fast growth. The combination of cloud computing, wireless communication infrastructure, portable computing devices, location-based services, mobile web and many more have laid the foundation for this novel computing model.
There are four predominant cloud deployment models:
1. Public cloud: we store all the systems and resources at an external service provider.
2. Private cloud: we store all the systems and resources internally at the company or organisation.
3. Multi-cloud: semi-public clouds that we share between members and a select group of organisations for more privacy.
4. Hybrid cloud: a combination of two or more public clouds. Each cloud is separate, and we link them back together.
What is a true cloud offering?
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) outlines five key cloud characteristics. All of the five characteristics must be present for us to consider the offering a true cloud offering:
1. On-demand self-service:
A consumer may request and receive access to a service offering without an admin or support staff having to fulfil the request manually. There is automation in this. It is beneficial for both the provider and the consumer of the service. It is an attractive feature of the cloud since it helps you to get the resources you need quickly and easily.
User self-service also reduces the administrative burden on the provider. We usually implement it in a user portal. On the front end, users will have a template interface that allows them to enter the appropriate information. On the back end, the portal will interface with management application programming interfaces (APIs) published by the application and services.
We must be aware of the potential compliance and regulatory issues when implementing user self-services.
2. Broad Network Access:
We should access cloud services easily. Users should only need an essential network connection to connect to services or applications. The provider must not demand users to have a large amount of bandwidth to use the service:
Cloud services should require either no client or a lightweight thin client.
We should be able to access cloud services by a wide variety of client devices. Users can connect via laptops or desktops, tablets, smartphones and a host of other options. Cloud services need to be able to support all of these devices. It is exceedingly advantageous if we can architect a solution that doesn’t require a client.
3. Resource pooling:
It helps save costs and allows flexibility on the provider side. Based on the fact that clients will constantly need all resources available, providers can service many more customers than they previously could if each customer requires dedicated resources. We achieve resource pooling usually via using virtualisation.
4. Rapid Elasticity
Describing the ability of a cloud environment to grow effortlessly and meet clients’ needs.
Cloud deployments should already possess the necessary infrastructure in place to expand the service capacity.
The key is that even if the resources are available, customers don’t have to use them until they need to. It enables the provider to save on consumption costs.
Providers achieve rapid elasticity via automation and orchestration. When resource usage hits a certain point, we set off a trigger. The trigger automatically starts the process of capacity expansion. Once the usage has a decreased capacity, the cloud shrinks to ensure that we do not waste resources.
Rapid elasticity allows the cloud to deal with burst capacity (an increased capacity needed for only a short period)
5. Measured services:
The cloud ought to have the ability to measure usage. We can quantify using various metrics, including time used, bandwidth used and data used. It enables the “pay as you go” feature.
Future of the Cloud
The future of Cloud Computing is integrated with Edge Computing for the Internet of Things and zero latency. According to Keyan Cao, Yefan Liu, Gongjie Meng and Qimeng Sun, Edge computing is a new computing paradigm performing computing at the edge of the network and making it closer to the data source. It deploys computing and storage resources. Edge Computing helps to meet the critical needs of the IT industry, for example, agile linking, real-time business, data optimisation, application intelligence, security and privacy, and meets the requirements of low latency and high bandwidth on the network. The emergence of edge computing will not replace cloud computing. They should exist together, complement each other, develop in a coordinated way and help the digital transformation of the industry to a greater extent. We still need to summarise all data onto edge nodes in the cloud to create in-depth analysis and obtain more meaningful analysis results.
Cloud data centres require energy consumption. We need to know how we can reduce carbon footprints. V.P Singh and Sukhpal Singh Gill propose a few solutions to this problem.
1. Server consolidation, where we aggregate the workload on fewer physical machines while turning off the rest of the server machines. It is one of the energy-efficient approaches for achieving energy efficiency via virtualisation or migration.
2. Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling Scheduling (DVFS) for managing power. We adjust the power and frequency of the computing device settings to optimise the resource allotment for tasks. 3. Thermal Aware Scheduling, by which we allocate workloads based on the temperature of physical machines to optimise energy consumption. It will help to reduce the cooling cost and the average temperature of the server. Thermal Aware Scheduling tries to avoid the creation of hotspots, performance degradation and reliability.
The future cloud relies on its integration with edge computing and how we can minimise its energy consumption. Cloud Computing has and will have endless potential to transform organisations.
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