Cloud computing is gaining popularity day by day, but at the same time is not fully understood. One is a cloud user if one is using Amazon or Gmail. But that is different from working with the cloud solutions directly. Selecting the right cloud solution depends entirely on the requirements and workloads for data handling. The least an organization can avail cloud computing is to use Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
Aspects, Tradeoffs, & Structure of Cloud Computing – Linux Cloud!
Cloud computing in its basic form comprises of on-demand computing delivered over the Internet. It includes Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), such as Google’s App Engine, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), such as Google Drive. Physical computing resources such as processors and storage are transformed into scalable and shareable resources over the Internet. With help of virtualization, this scalability is further enhanced and made more efficient. Thus, cloud computing provides users with massive computing power and storage in an encapsulated form.
One aspect of cloud computing is the level of encapsulation it provides to its users. The user is unaware of the underlying platform. It could be Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, etc. Needless to say, in the majority of the cloud systems, Linux is the underlying platform. Although there are a significant number of windows based solutions as well. Linux and open source technologies are playing a huge role in making cloud computing services more accessible to users.
Linux Cloud Hosting- Virtualization & Community
Let us now see how Linux and open source technologies are deployed in the cloud computing environment.
- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
This service allows access to software over the Internet. An Application Service Provider (ASP) provides subscriptions to software which is hosted or delivered over the Internet. The ASP charges for the software based on its usage. Another type of SaaS is the execution of the software remotely. This software can be a suite of services to be used by a local application. An example of this type of service is Google Apps which provides enterprise applications through a web browser. Such services rely on application server which is software framework. Examples of application server which have been built using open source technologies are Red Hat JBoss Application Server, Apache Geronimo, and IBM® WebSphere® Application Server.
- Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
PaaS can be looked upon as a virtualized platform consisting of one or more servers, operating systems and web based applications like Apache and MySQL. An example of such service is Google Apps Engine, a service that allows deployment of web applications on Google’s scalable architecture. The engine provides users with a sandbox for Python applications which can be referenced over the Internet. Besides providing user authentication, and managing e-mails; the engines provides Python APIs for storage and management of the data using Google Query Language (GQL). The access to the underlying operating system by the web applications is restricted by the sandbox, thus limiting the application’s functionality. But at the same time The Apps Engine is very helpful in the construction of the web site.
- Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
IaaS comprises of services for delivering the computer infrastructure. This suite of services is different from PaaS and is provided as virtual hardware without the software stack. The user provides a Virtual Machine (VM) image that is invoked on the virtualized servers. It is the most basic form of computing as a service. The most famous IaaS provider is Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The user can identify the operating system and an application set or provide their own Virtual Machine (VM). Applications are then deployed on it over the servers. The user is billed for computer time, storage and bandwidth.
The open source implementation of EC2 is the Eucalyptus (Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems) which is compatible in terms of interfacing with the commercial service. Both the EC2 and the Eucalyptus deploys Linux with Xen for operating system virtualization.
It can be safely assumed that the cloud computing will be driven by open source development on Linux. The amount of investment that is being poured into the cloud computing, it will be worth seeing the accompanying new technologies and architectures.
Linux Hosting – The Best Linux Cloud Hosting Services!
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