By: Shahzad Sarwar Dated: 15th July 2010 http://softarchitect.wordpress.com/ www.shahzadsb.com

1. A Cross Referenced Whitepaper on Cloud Computing
http://softarchitect.wordpress.com/
www.shahzadsb.com
By: Shahzad Sarwar
Dated: 14th July 2010

2. 1 Definition:
According to wiki:
Cloud Computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information
are provided to computers and other devices on demand, like the electricity grid.
According to National Institute of Standards and Technology:
Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of
configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can
be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
2 Basic Elelments:
Basic Elements of cloud computing consist of:
• SaaS:Software as a Service
• PaaS: Platfom as a Service
• IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service
• Utility Computing
Lets review these concepts separately.
2.1 SAAS:
According to wiki:
Software as a service is software that is deployed over the internet and/or is deployed to run behind a
firewall in your local area network or personal computer. With SaaS, a provider licenses an application to
customers as a service on demand, through a subscription or a “pay-as-you-go” model. Also called
“software on demand”.
Benefits:
• Save money by not having to purchase servers or other software to support use
• Focus Budgets on competitive advantage rather than infrastructure
• Monthly obligation rather than up front capital cost
• Reduced need to predict scale of demand and infrastructure investment up front as available
capacity matches demand
• Multi-Tenant efficiency

3. • Flexibility and scalability
2.2 PaaS:
PaaS offerings facilitate deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and
managing the underlying hardware and software and provisioning hosting capabilities, providing all of the
facilities required to support the complete life cycle of building and delivering web applications and
services entirely available from the Internet.
PaaS offerings may include facilities for application design, application development, testing, deployment
and hosting as well as application services such as team collaboration, web service integration and
marshalling, database integration, security, scalability, storage, persistence, state management, application
versioning, application instrumentation and developer community facilitation. These services may be
provisioned as an integrated solution over the web.
2.3 IaaS:
Cloud infrastructure services or "Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)" delivers computer infrastructure,
typically a platform virtualization environment as a service. Rather than purchasing servers, software, data
center space or network equipment, clients instead buy those resources as a fully outsourced service. The
service is typically billed on a utility computing basis and amount of resources consumed (and therefore the
cost) will typically reflect the level of activity. It is an evolution of virtual private server offerings.
2.4 Utility computing:
Utility computing is the packaging of computing resources, such as computation and storage, as a metered
service similar to a traditional public utility (such as electricity, water, natural gas, or telephone network).
This system has the advantage of a low or no initial cost to acquire hardware; instead, computational
resources are essentially rented. Customers with very large computations or a sudden peak in demand can
also avoid the delays that would result from physically acquiring and assembling a large number of
computers.
3 Essential Characteristics:
• On-demand self-service. A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as
server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction
with each service’s provider.
• Broad network access. Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard
mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones,
laptops, and PDAs).
• Resource pooling. The provider’s computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers
using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and
reassigned according to consumer demand. There is a sense of location independence in that the
customer generally has no control or knowledge over the exact location of the provided resources
but may be able to specify location at a higher level of abstraction (e.g., country, state, or
datacenter). Examples of resources include storage, processing, memory, network bandwidth, and
virtual machines.
• Rapid elasticity. Capabilities can be rapidly and elastically provisioned, in some cases
automatically, to quickly scale out and rapidly released to quickly scale in. To the consumer, the
capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be purchased in any
quantity at any time.
• Measured Service. Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a
metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage,
processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled,
and reported providing

4. 4 Must differentiate with:
1. Autonomic computing — "computer systems capable of self-management".
2. Client–server model – Client–server computing refers broadly to any distributed application that
distinguishes between service providers (servers) and service requesters (clients).
3. Grid computing — "a form of distributed computing and parallel computing, whereby a 'super and
virtual computer' is composed of a cluster of networked, loosely coupled computers acting in
concert to perform very large tasks"
4. Mainframe — powerful computers used mainly by large organizations for critical applications,
typically bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource
planning, and financial transaction processing.
5. Utility computing — the "packaging of computing resources, such as computation and storage, as
a metered service similar to a traditional public utility, such as electricity".
6. Peer-to-peer – a distributed architecture without the need for central coordination, with
participants being at the same time both suppliers and consumers of resources (in contrast to the
traditional client–server model). Deployment models
5 Deployment Models:
According to National Institute of Standards and Technology, there are following deployment models.
• Private cloud. The cloud infrastructure is operated solely for an organization. It may be managed
by the organization or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise.
• Community cloud. The cloud infrastructure is shared by several organizations and supports a
specific community that has shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements, policy, and
compliance considerations). It may be managed by the organizations or a third party and may exist
on premise or off premise.
• Public cloud. The cloud infrastructure is made available to the general public or a large industry
group and is owned by an organization selling cloud services.
• Hybrid cloud. The cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more clouds (private,
community, or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together by standardized or
proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting for load-
balancing between clouds).

5. 6 Intercloud
The Intercloud is an interconnected global "cloud of clouds" and an extension of the Internet "network of
networks" on which it is based.
The Intercloud scenario is based on the key concept that each single cloud does not have infinite physical
resources. If a cloud saturates the computational and storage resources of its virtualization infrastructure, it
could not be able to satisfy further requests for service allocations sent from its clients. The Intercloud
scenario aims to address such situation, in fact, each cloud can use the computational and storage resources
of the virtualization infrastructures of other clouds. Such form of pay-for-use introduces new business
opportunities among cloud providers. Nevertheless, the Intercloud raises many challenges concerning cloud
federation, security, interoperability, QoS, monitoring and billing.

6. 7 Cloud Plateforms:
Following are some of best Cloud computing plateforms availiable in industry.
• Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, is probably the most generalized and best-known of the
cloud computing service offerings.
• IBM Computing on Demand or Blue Cloud is a highly enterprise-focused cloud computing offering
that, because it is related to and built with the same technology sold to enterprises, can cross over
between public and private cloud applications.
• Microsoft's Azure cloud computing, based on Microsoft Vista and .NET technology, includes both
cloud computing and cloud-hosted extension services. It also supports public and private cloud
computing plans.
• Sun Cloud, like IBM's offering, is available both in public and private cloud forms. Since Oracle is
acquiring Sun, this offering may change over time.
• Salesforce.com's Force.com cloud is easily integrated with Salesforce.com's application tools.
• Google's AppEngine cloud offering is targeted particularly to web developers and web hosting
applications.
8 Cloud Applications:
• Mint: A Cloud based personal finance tool, to manage your money. It was launched in September
2007. All money related accounts viz. Bank Accounts, Credit Card, Loan, Stock Brokerage &
other Investment are provided in one place.
• Panda Cloud Antivirus: The first free Antivirus from the cloud. It has received many decent
reviews.
o No need to worry about regular updates.
o Occupies very little system resources.
o It uses collective intelligence servers for fast detection
o Simple interface.
• Amazon.com
Amazon.com’s Customer Experience Analytics Team uses Amazon Relational Database Service
to store and query customer simulation data.
• Net Applications
Net Applications gains a competitive edge over other Web analytics solutions by using Alexa Web
Information Service to deliver in-depth Web traffic information.
• Channel Intelligence
Using Amazon Mechanical Turk, Channel Intelligence was able to leverage human intelligence
around the globe and decrease task-specific costs by 85%.
• Online suite
Google’s online suite of office applications is probably the best known but by no means the only
solution on offer.Examples of online suite’s on offer include Ajax13, ThinkFree and Microsoft’s
Office Live.
• Google Wave:
Using Google Wave you can create a document and then invite others to comment, amend, offer
opinion, or otherwise join in with the creation of the final draft.
Other examples include Spicebird, Mikogo, Stixy and Vyew to name but a few.

7. 9 Criticism:
Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corporation has stated that cloud computing has been defined as "everything
that we already do" and that it will have no effect except to "change the wording on some of our ads".
Oracle Corporation has since launched a cloud computing center and worldwide tour.
Richard Stallman said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into
locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time. "It's stupidity. It's worse than
stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign", he told The Guardian. "Somebody is saying this is inevitable –
and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make
it true."
General References:
http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing/cloud-def-v15.doc
http://www.whatissoa.com/whatiscloud/default.php
http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/
What is Cloud Computing?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid201_gci1287881,00.html
http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/
Videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PNuQHUiV3Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdBd14rjcs0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hplXnFUlPmg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgujaIzkwrE&feature=channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oA5z0V5yJJE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIbkMjrrdjQ&feature=channel