Cloud Computing Applications: Detailed
Cloud Computing is undoubtedly becoming an emerging platform for both the industrial and scientific community. The promise of scale, elasticity, and “pay-as-you-go” pricing models is attracting corporate IT staff, researchers, and individual software application developers.
Cloud computing providers offer their services according to three fundamental models:Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS), and Software as a service (SaaS) where IaaS is the most basic and each higher model abstracts from the details of the lower models.
Infrastructure as a Service is a provision model in which an organization outsources the equipment used to support operations, including storage, hardware, servers and networking components. The service provider owns the equipment and is responsible for housing, running and maintaining it. The client typically pays on a per-use basis. Infrastructure as a Service is sometimes referred to as Hardware as a Service (HaaS). To deploy their applications, cloud users install operating-system images and their application software on the cloud infrastructure. In this model, the cloud user patches and maintains the operating systems and the application software.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a way to rent hardware, operating systems, storage and network capacity over the Internet. The service delivery model allows the customer to rent virtualized servers and associated services for running existing applications or developing and testing new ones. With PaaS, operating systemfeatures can be changed and upgraded frequently. Geographically distributed development teams can work together on software development projects. Services can be obtained from diverse sources that cross international boundaries. Initial and ongoing costs can be reduced by the use of infrastructure services from a single vendor rather than maintaining multiple hardware facilities that often perform duplicate functions or suffer from incompatibility problems. Overall expenses can also be minimized by unification of programming development efforts.
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network, typically the Internet. SaaS is becoming an increasingly prevalent delivery model as underlying technologies that support Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) mature and new developmental approaches, such as Ajax, become popular.
Network as a service (NaaS) is a category of cloud services where the capability provided to the cloud service user is to use network/transport connectivity services and/or inter-cloud network connectivity services. NaaS involves the optimization of resource allocations by considering network and computing resources as a unified whole. On-demand self-service allows users to obtain, configure and deploy cloud services themselves using cloud service catalogues, without requiring the assistance of IT. This feature is listed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as a characteristic of cloud computing.
The self-service requirement of cloud computing prompts infrastructure vendors to create cloud computing templates, which are obtained from cloud service catalogues. Manufacturers of such templates or blueprints include Hewlett-Packard (HP), which names its templates as HP Cloud Maps RightScale and Red Hat, which names its templates CloudForms.
Cloud computing is not an all-or-nothing proposition. What we are slowly migrating toward is a blended computing model that will combine the best elements of public cloud services with on-premise applications that will run on internal IT systems that use the same architectures as public cloud services. And once that happens, we'll enter a new era of IT flexibility that should for the first time really allow IT organizations to dynamically respond to the rapidly changing needs of the business, versus always trying to get the business to conform to the way IT works.
Cloud computing providers offer their services according to three fundamental models:Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS), and Software as a service (SaaS) where IaaS is the most basic and each higher model abstracts from the details of the lower models.
Infrastructure as a Service is a provision model in which an organization outsources the equipment used to support operations, including storage, hardware, servers and networking components. The service provider owns the equipment and is responsible for housing, running and maintaining it. The client typically pays on a per-use basis. Infrastructure as a Service is sometimes referred to as Hardware as a Service (HaaS). To deploy their applications, cloud users install operating-system images and their application software on the cloud infrastructure. In this model, the cloud user patches and maintains the operating systems and the application software.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a way to rent hardware, operating systems, storage and network capacity over the Internet. The service delivery model allows the customer to rent virtualized servers and associated services for running existing applications or developing and testing new ones. With PaaS, operating systemfeatures can be changed and upgraded frequently. Geographically distributed development teams can work together on software development projects. Services can be obtained from diverse sources that cross international boundaries. Initial and ongoing costs can be reduced by the use of infrastructure services from a single vendor rather than maintaining multiple hardware facilities that often perform duplicate functions or suffer from incompatibility problems. Overall expenses can also be minimized by unification of programming development efforts.
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network, typically the Internet. SaaS is becoming an increasingly prevalent delivery model as underlying technologies that support Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) mature and new developmental approaches, such as Ajax, become popular.
Network as a service (NaaS) is a category of cloud services where the capability provided to the cloud service user is to use network/transport connectivity services and/or inter-cloud network connectivity services. NaaS involves the optimization of resource allocations by considering network and computing resources as a unified whole. On-demand self-service allows users to obtain, configure and deploy cloud services themselves using cloud service catalogues, without requiring the assistance of IT. This feature is listed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as a characteristic of cloud computing.
The self-service requirement of cloud computing prompts infrastructure vendors to create cloud computing templates, which are obtained from cloud service catalogues. Manufacturers of such templates or blueprints include Hewlett-Packard (HP), which names its templates as HP Cloud Maps RightScale and Red Hat, which names its templates CloudForms.
Cloud computing is not an all-or-nothing proposition. What we are slowly migrating toward is a blended computing model that will combine the best elements of public cloud services with on-premise applications that will run on internal IT systems that use the same architectures as public cloud services. And once that happens, we'll enter a new era of IT flexibility that should for the first time really allow IT organizations to dynamically respond to the rapidly changing needs of the business, versus always trying to get the business to conform to the way IT works.