Which directrion will Cloud Computing take us - Essay Example

?What Direction will Cloud Computing take us? of the 30th November 0: Introduction This is a research report on the future of cloud computing. It is based on the topic of cloud computing centering on the definition, its features, the various forms of cloud computing, impact of cloud in terms of terms of pros and cons of cloud computing, and the prospect of cloud computing. One of the themes that have been captured in this section is the threat posed by cloud computing on programming. This study will explore how this happens. The research concludes with lessons for the future and recommendations based on findings in the field of cloud computing. 1.1. Background Information Cloud computing is the fastest growing part of Information Technology. It is regarded as the fifth generation of computing after the mainframe, personal computer, client-server computing, and the web. It confers tremendous benefits to customers and users (Bechtolsheim, 2008). Experts have estimated that by the year 2012, the size of cloud computing infrastructure market will rise to $42 billion, up from $billion in 2008 (Bechtolsheim, 2008). This trend is as a result of the high growth rate in cloud spending, six times faster than the traditional IT spending. Stanley, states that public cloud workloads are expected to increase at the rate of 50% in the next three years, twice as the market currently expects (2011). Cloud computing represents a different way to architecture and managing remote computing resources. Its simplicity is evident in that one just needs to open an account with a service provider to start building and providing application systems into a cloud. The increased connectivity and increasing amount of data has led many service providers to employ large infrastructures with dynamic load and access balancing. This explains the reason behind the rapid growth in cloud computing. Service provider have been handing out and reproducing data across servers on demand, thereby improving the utilization of resources. This has enabled web servers to offer accessibility across multiple servers and routes according to the traffic (Jefrey, K. and Lutz, 2010). Cloud computing is not a novelty. It dates back to the 1990s where the ability of active traffic switching to stabilize utilization and to indicate virtualization of telecoms infrastructure became in use. Other data centers employed methods to maintain scalability and reliability in order to ensure the availability o f their hosted data. In the recent times, multiple cloud domains have emerged which explains the reason behind the many definitions and meanings of cloud computing. There are expectations in the industry that cloud model will find further uptake in future as means to manage the infrastructure of providers and provide small units with the capacities of a larger communications beyond their means. Warr (2009) says that big companies have an advantage over smaller ones as they can afford to expand their own data centers, unlike their counterparts who have house their IT infrastructure in someone else’s facility. cloud computing has enabled the development of coloration centers where multiple customers can locate network, server and storage assets, and connect to a wide range of telecommunications and other network service providers with minimum cost and complication (Warr, 2009) There exist various definitions and interpretations of cloud computing/cloud, hence one can only give a representative and not a comprehensive definition of the term (ELC, 2010). Lutz and Jeffrey define cloud as an elastic execution environment involving numerous stakeholders and providing a metered service at several granularities for a particular level of quality. Cloud computing is defined as the active provisioning of IT capabilities-‘hardware, software or services’- from third parties above a network-system (Warr,2009). ELS define it as an outsourcing of IT infrastructures via the internet. It saves the agony of maintaining hardware and software environment, by providing computing resources on demand via the internet (service provider). Clouds are hardware-based services that offer computer, network and storage capacity where the hardware management is highly abstracted from the buyer. The buyer acquire infrastructure costs as variable operating expenditures and the infrastructure capacity is highly elastic (Warr, 2009). The clouds are primarily platforms that allow executions in various forms across multiple resources. They allow the execution of codes in a managed and elastic functions There is a big difference between cloud computing and the traditional outsourcing in that customers do not hand over their IT resources to be managed but they plug into the cloud to get services (Gelernter, 2010). There is the expectation that the cloud paradigm will find an uptake in the future as a means of managing the infrastructure of providers. These future clouds are expected to maintain a pre-scheduled level of quality, respectively boundary conditions such as performance, energy consumption and performance. They should allow the integration resources across organizational boundaries integrating with multiple stakeholders (World press, 2011). Table 1: Worldwide IT Cloud Spending 2010: source: IDC 2008. Item of Spending Percentage Applications 52 Software 18 Storage 13 Application development 9 server 8 2.1: Features of next generation Cloud Computing As the cloud computing industry leaps into the future, there is a need for service providers to consider the need to support the following characteristics which will develop their business to a greater extent. 2.1.1: Architectural Style This type of style defines groups of families of software systems based on the patterns for characteristics and how architectural components interact. These styles define the types of architecture components exist in style and the best way to combine them for deployment. Proper architectural styles should be used when implementing cloud-based services. These architectural styles provide a guide on how to component provisions may be composited into higher order functionality, for better use by people and other systems (Brown and Winans, 2009). Architectural styles are critical to the coordination of services and enabling the operability between thousands of collaborating businesses (Stanley, 2011). They will be useful in enhancing interoperability in businesses and organizations through integrating at business functional level than a data level. 2.1.2: External User and Access Control Management. For one to implement user and access control management there must be the presence a typical enterprise application. His is a characteristic of cloud computing where the user is allocated one or many application roles, with each role with a set of privileges that relate to use of specific application functionality through a graphical user interface. The same can also be achieved through some programming interface that ensures that only legitimate clients have access to it (Brown and Winans, 2009). Before any client can access services within the system, it has to pass through an authentication process to determine its legitimacy. The use of wireless services has been hampered by denial of service attacks from attackers. Hence, future cloud computing should enhance identity management to ensure that only legitimate clients have access to given networks. 2.1.3: Interaction Container. One of the latest inventions in cloud computing is by the J2EE/JAVA EE community, with its introduction of the container to streamline the structure of thin java clients (Brown and Winans, 2009). The new container model made it possible for transparent availability of thin-multitier applications to businesses. This marked a shift from the old model where a code was required for one to access the applications. An interaction container enables service providers to manage many interactions between a set of participants over some time. This will work to make it easier to administer an interaction as a single possibly long running business interaction. In its application, the container model allows orchestration of business service using externalized policy. An interaction is hosted within an interaction container, and provides service in distributed contexts. The people participating in the in an interaction are lowed to interact to perform their functions in a business organization and manage exceptions and faults which might arise in the process. 2.1.4: policy Engine This is an externalized policy management that harmonizes and adjudicates conflicting policies used across architectural layers. The components in all architectural layers are allowed to participate in the harmonization of the policies and enforcement. (Brown and Weans, 2009). For this to happen, the following conditions must be put in place: policy extension points must be exposed and declare formally in any part of the architecture, policy management need to support policy pushdown to enable the extensible and dynamic detection of policy violation and policy enforcement, and finally, it must be possible to version policy in such a way that policy decisions made at a given time can be reproduced. Future software systems need to be implemented in a flexible manner. This means that they have to consider the views of new markets, market evolution and changes in regulation and standards the impulse of interaction participants, implementation of policy bugs, and needs of the customers. This has to be accompanied by an important difference between the inside-out and outside-in architectural styles. Inside-out architecture involve legacy applications where policy is entrenched, making it difficult to externalize it. In the future, there has to be a transformation of the Inside-Out architecture into an Outside-In architecture, to make it more possible to externalize policy and develop towards the fully autonomic computing endpoint (Brown and Winans, 2009). 2.1.5: Utility Computing There is a growing complexity of IT systems, hence, the need to address the issue. Fr instance, loosely coupling architecture components makes them less brittle on top of exposing them. As systems become more interconnected and diverse, designers have not been able to expect and design connections among components, leaving such issues to be dealt with at a runtime. This pose a challenge in the future as the systems might become too massive and complex to install and manage, configure, maintain, and merge. However, externalization of the policy provides a solution to this problem, as it makes it possible, to composite clouds, and manages policy compliance. However, this in itself is not enough to address the future challenge; there is the need to address the structure of the cloud. The emergence of cloud computing products in the market, have seen the need to compound clouds, grids, or meshes of controllable computing resources. One of the best approaches to address this issue is the management interface where all manageable resources are conforming. This enables the management over heterogeneous infrastructures to be uniform. A good example is the approach taken by Microsoft, which acknowledges the need for a uniform management abstraction layer (Brown and Winans, 2009). There is a need to expose the cloud and its components through a well defined management interface which will enable the management policies to be applied even to the content of the containers like interaction container discussed in section 2.1.3. A utility computing exhibits the following traits; It has an OS supervision layer that alters hosted resources in a date a centre into a policy-managed cloud It enables clouds that conform to the similar cloud supervision interface to be composited while preserving the identity of the cloud. Keeps a data base of all resources in a cloud in line with the management policy In line with the management policy, it reallocates resources in a cloud to contain real moment and business oriented practice patterns It meters out all resources managed within a cloud Provide security and access control that can coalesce across cloud boundaries. It takes part in arbitration of policy collisions across all architectural layers where suitable 2.1.6: Cloud Composition The capacity of one cloud to partake in managing an additional cloud is a key aspect in the future of cloud computing. It will provide a means for private cloud to briefly use the wealth of a community cloud as part of an elastic resource capability strategy use the resources of an unrestricted cloud as part of an elastic resource capability strategy. When this is done, it will be possible have a more profound sharing of functionality, shared information and computing resources. 2.1.7: Container Permeability One of the features of cloud computing is that the clods have containers, which are a virtualized image containing technology and applications traits. The cloud container is impermeable in such a way that it cannot directly mange container contents. It also measures that the contents of the cloud do not participate in cloud or container organization (Brown and Winans, 2009). 3.0: Types of clouds. The different terminologies used in defining cloud computing have resulted into the classification of cloud computing into three types. They are categorized as: 3.1: Infratsructure as a service (IaaS). This is a type of clouding where grids or clusters, virtualized servers, network, memory, storage, CPU and system software are delivered as services. Services are charged b usage and their capacity can either be increased or decreased more or less on demand (Warr, 2009). They are also referred to as resources clouds since they provide manageable and scalable resources as a service to the users. This type of cloud computing enables services to be provided via a service interface (Lutz and Jeffrey, 2010). 3.2: Platform as a service (PaaS). This type of cloud provide virtualized servers on which users can run applications, and/or design new ones, with little worry on maintenance of the operating-systems, the server hardware, load balancing or the capacity of computing. According t0 Lutz and Jeffrey (2010), PaaS provide computational resources via a platform upon which applications and service can be developed and hosted. They make use of dedicated APIs to manage the behavior of a server housing engine which executes and replicates the execution as per the user requests. 3.3. (Clouds) Software as a Service (SaaS) They are also known as service or application clouds as they offer implementation of specific business processes that are provided with specific cloud capabilities. SaaS provide services and applications using a cloud infrastructure, as opposed to providing cloud features themselves. They are processed and housed by the SaaS dealers and the users access them over the internet (Warr, 2009). This marks a paradigm shift from the traditional applications of users installing software on their computers, to a new dispensation where the software are owned by vendors and runs on a computer in the vendor’s data centre. This means that all customers of a SaaS vendor use the same software. Examples include Google Docs, yahoo, Skype and SAP Business by Design 4.0: Impacts of Cloud Computing The movement of workloads into cloud environments has had significant effects on both where and how the data is built. These can be classified as both positive and negative impacts on both the service vendors and the end users. 4.1. Advantages Cloud computing confers unique advantages to an organization and service users depending on the IT needs. These benefits have been outlined below; 4.1.1: increased Efficiency inn Service Provision By offering services across the internet, cloud computing has made it possible to provide special services such as education, health services, consultancy services, e-commerce and internet wire money transfer. According to Educause, (2009), colleges and universities are expected t provide a wide range of technology services which are highly specialized to individual campuses and distant learning students. This has been made possible by cloud computing where the services can be provided via the internet. 4.1.2: Increased reliability and Availability Cloud computing provide IT organizations and clients with a special model of operation, one which confers the advantage of the maturity of the web applications and network and the rising interoperability of computing systems to provide IT services (EDUSON, 2010). This has enabled service providers to efficiently manage upgrades and maintenance, backups and disaster recovery. Cloud computing also enhances more performance as processing is done on demand. There is also the separation of processing and storage which increases the reliability of service provision the applications in cloud computing can be accessed from anywhere, anytime, which makes it relatively easier for vendors to each new customers. 4.1.3: Economies of Scale Cloud computing entails the use of single software by many users from a central point, rather than each client having its own software. This provides economies of scale which reduces significantly the price of such software. The cost is also lowered by the fact that there are no hardware investments or software licenses (ELC, 2010). On top of this, there are less maintenance costs as someone else manages the servers and core software. Cloud computing enables vendors to drive down data centre operation costs as it s economical and efficient (Bechtolshem, 2008). 4.1.4: Scalability Cloud computing scalability is beneficial to large organizations such educational research centers, as they are able to store vast amount of data for research projects. It also, makes it probable to offer services to green IT companies (companies who have mounted their data centers near sources of renewable energies). This way, cloud computing offers unlimited storage of data which can be retrieved whenever needed with much ease. 4.1.5: Security Cloud computing comes with a security system which ensures that only legitimate users have access to the data and other services provided over the internet. Despite the threat posed by denial of service attacks across the internet, cloud computing remains one of the secure IT applications. This has been enabled by the easier maintenance and enforcement of policies 4.2: Disadvantage/setbacks Apart from offering benefits to the users, cloud computing has its negative side. These are analyzed as drawbacks/disadvantages in the following order; 4.2.1: Security Cloud computing has raised serious concerns on the security of data, integrity and intellectual management. The distributed nature of cloud computing means that the risks are also distributed. The task of protecting a data centre is a tough one, as one is faced with the possibility of attacks from hackers and other adversaries. To protect a cloud from attacks, there is a need for extra measure of vigilance, as the data and service can be extended over large geographical areas (Harvey, 2011). At the same time, cloud customers may risk using data by having them sheltered into proprietary formats and may perhaps lose control of the data because tools to determine who can view it are inadequate. 4.2.2: Immature Standards The standards used in cloud computing are immature and cloud computing is highly dynamic which means things change relatively fast. For instance, all IaaS and SaaS providers use different technologies and different standards. This means that an application like Google App Engine cannot support an SQL database (Warr, 2009). This means that service users cannot just move an application to the cloud and expect them to just work (Warr, 2009). 4.2.4: Latency and Performance Issues. The internet connection is predicted to add the limit bandwidth. This means that a packet will take a lot of time to travel from one destination to the other. This presents a possibility where in the future, programming models that exploit multithreading may hide latency in order to avoid the effects of slowed run-times. 4.2.5: Unpredictibility and lose of Control Cloud computing has denied the end users control over the software as someone else hosts the data, software and hardware. There is also the issue of unpredictable costs as the cost of computing is determined by the vendor. There is also the issue of dependency on the internet which means one has keep on connecting to the internet to access services. 5.0: Conclusion and Recommendations Cloud computing is the best growing component of IT. The favorable economic environment is attributed for the sharp increase in the adoption of cloud computing. It has three models in the name of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. It offers a wide range of benefits as well as setbacks to end users, even though the advantages seem to outweigh the disadvantages. Cloud computing and the related technology are maturing at a very fast rate. Hence, there is the urgency for players in the industry to study the opportunities presented by cloud computing. Organizations need to seriously look at the way cloud computing can be exploited to benefit the organizations. The future of cloud computing is full of changes for the players in the IT industry will develop their IT infrastructure (Bechtoisheim, 2008). References Bechtoisheim, A. 2008. Cloud Computing. Accessed 29 November 2011. Brown, S.J. and Winans, B.T. 2009. Cloud Computing: A Collection of Working Papers. Accessed 29 November 2011 EDUCAUSE, 2009. 7 Things You Should Know About Cloud Computing. Accessed 29 November 2011, http:creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ncnd/30/ ELC, 2010. Cloud Computing: What you should know. Gelernter, D. 2010. Will Cloud Computing Make Us Safer? Accessed 29 November 2011 http://bigthink.com/davidgelernter. Harvey, P, 2011. How Cloud Computing Lets Companies Do More: And Just as Importantly, Waste Less. Accessed 29 November 2011, http://www.dmagazine.com/Home/D_CEO/2011/October/How_Cloud_Computing_Lets_ Compa nies_Do_More.aspx Jefrey, K. and Lutz, N.B. 2010. The Future of Cloud Computing: Opportunities for European Cloud Computing Beyond 2010. Accessed 29 November 2011 Stanley, M. 2011. Cloud Computing Takes Off. New York: Morgan Stanley Research. Warr, W. A. 2009. Cloud Computing. Accessed 28 November 2011, http:www.warr.com. World press, 2011. Cloud Computing. Accessed 29 November 2011, http://www.grok.in/iaas Read More