LESSON 2: Cloud Computing

(Solutions)
1. Defining attributes

1.1 Cloud Computing

From a technical point of view cloud computing is a centralized or a distributed computing system.
The cloud applies parallel or concurrent computing, or both. Clouds can be built with physical or
virtualized resources over large data centers that are centralized or distributed.
From a functional point of view is ubiquitous, on-demand network access to a shared pool of
configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) than
can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider
interaction.
Some cloud activities ares:

Service management and provisioning (virtualization, call center, QoS management).

Customer services (subscriptions, preferences, reporting).
Security management (authentication, intrusion prevention and detection, cryptography).
Integration services (data management, development)

2. Deployment Models

A public cloud is basically the Internet. Service providers use the internet to make resources, such as
applications (also known as Software-as-a-service) and storage, available to the general public, or on
a public cloud. Examples of public clouds include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), IBMs Blue
Cloud, Sun Cloud, Google AppEngine and Windows Azure Services Platform.
Private clouds are data center architectures owned by a single company that provides flexibility,
scalability, provisioning, automation and monitoring. The goal of a private cloud is not sell as-aservice offerings to external customers but instead to gain the benefits of cloud architecture
without giving up the control of maintaining your own data center.
By using a hybrid cloud, companies can maintain control of an internally managed private cloud
while relying on the public cloud as needed. For instance during peak periods individual
applications, or portions of applications can be migrated to the Public Cloud. This will also be
beneficial during predictable outages: hurricane warnings, scheduled maintenance windows, rolling
brown/blackouts.

3. Delivery Models
3.1 Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
Applications are supplied by the service provider and the user does not manage or control the
underlying cloud infrastructure or individual application capabilities.

The services offered include:

Enterprise services such as: workflow management, group-ware and collaborative, supply
chain, communications, digital signature, customer relationship management (CRM),
desktop software, financial management, geo-spatial, and search
Web 2.0 applications such as: metadata management, social networking, blogs, wiki
services, and portal services.
This model is not suitable for real-time applications or for those where data is not allowed to be
hosted externally. Some examples are the Google Apps (Drive, Gmail,...).

3.2 Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

This model allows a cloud user to deploy consumer-created or acquired applications using
programming languages and tools supported by the service (platform) provider.
The user has control over the deployed applications and, possibly, application hosting environment
configurations and does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including
network, servers, operating systems, or storage.
This is not particularly useful when the application must be portable, when proprietary programming
languages are used or when the hardware and software must be customized to improve the
performance of the application.
An example is the Google Application Engine.

3.3 Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

The user is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and
applications but does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure. Even though, he
has control over operating systems, storage, deployed applications, and possibly limited control of
some networking components, e.g., host firewalls.
Services offered by this delivery model include: server hosting, Web servers, storage, computing
hardware, operating systems, virtual instances, load balancing, Internet access, and bandwidth
provisioning. An example of this model is Amazon EC2.

4. Cloudonomics
4.1 Classical VS Cloud Computing

4.2 Elasticity of resources

Cloud Computing: Add or Remove Resources as Needed

For measure cloud computing cost we use the following:

4.3 The law of cloudonomics

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

Utility services cost less even though they cost more

On-demand trumps forecasting
The peak of the sum is never greater than the sum of the peaks
Aggregate demand is smoother than individual
Average unit costs are reduced by distributing fixed costs over more units of output
Superiority in numbers is the most important factor in the result of a combat (Clausewitz)
Space-time is a continuum (Einstein/Minkowski)
Dispersion is the inverse square of latency
Don't put all your eggs in one basket
An object at rest tends to stay at rest (Newton)

5. Issues 35-40
5.1 Ethics
Control is a third party service and data is stored on multiple sites producing interoperability accros
the network
This also may include unauthorized access, data corruption, infrastructure failure, and service
unavailability

5.2 De-perimeterisation
Systems can span the boundaries of multiple organizations and cross the security border. Who is
responsible?

5.3 Privacy
Privacy is affected by cultural difference. Which policies should be applied?

5.4 Vulnerabilities

Vendor lock-in
Clouds are affected by malicious attacks and failures of the infrastructure, e.g. power failures
Such events can affect the Internet domain name servers and prevent access to a cloud or
can directly affect the clouds:
in 2009, Google was the target of a denial of service attack which took down Google
News and Gmail for several days;
In 2012 lightning caused a prolonged down time at Amazon.
Instagram reporting about the outage; several problems uncovered.
Electrical: Back up Electric generators.
Software: Switching to resources In another AWS region didnt work.
Software: Bug in Load balancing (Elastic Load Balancer)

6. Challenges

Availability of service; what happens when the service provider cannot deliver?
Diversity of services, data organization, user interfaces available at different service
providers limit user mobility; once a customer is hooked to one provider it is hard to move
to another.
Standardization efforts at NIST!
Data confidentiality and auditability, a serious problem.
Data transfer bottleneck; many applications are data-intensive.