Skip to main content

1.9.2 The Cloud Service Offerings and Deployment Models

Cloud computing has been an attractive proposition both for the CFO and the CTO of an enterprise primarily due its ease of usage. This has been achieved by large data center service vendors or now better known as cloud service vendors again primarily due to their scale of operations. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and a few others have been the key players apart from open source Hadoop built around the Apache ecosystem


As shown in Figure  the cloud service offerings from these vendors can broadly be classified into three major streams: the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the Platform as a Service (PaaS), and the Software as a Service (SaaS). While IT managers and system administrators preferred IaaS as offered by Amazon for many of their virtualized IT needs, the programmers preferred PaaS offerings like Google AppEngine (Java/Python programming) or Microsoft Azure (.Net programming). 

Users of large-scale enterprise software invariably found that if they had been using the cloud, it was because their usage of the specific software package was available as a service—it was, in essence, a SaaS offering. Salesforce.com was an exemplary SaaS offering on the Internet. 

From a technology viewpoint, as of today, the IaaS type of cloud offerings have been the most successful and widespread in usage. However, the potential of PaaS has been high: All new cloud-oriented application development initiatives are based on the PaaS model. The significant impact of enterprises leveraging IaaS and PaaS has been in the form of services whose usage is representative of SaaS on the Cloud. Be it search (Google/Yahoo/Bing, etc.) or email (Gmail/Yahoomail/Hotmail, etc.) or social networking (Facebook/ Twitter/Orkut, etc.), most users are unaware that much of their on-line
activities has been supported in one form or the other by the cloud.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

2.1 VIRTUAL MACHINES PROVISIONING AND MANAGEABILITY

In this section, we will have an overview on the typical life cycle of VM and its major possible states of operation, which make the management and automation of VMs in virtual and cloud environments easier than in traditional computing environments As shown in Figure above, the cycle starts by a request delivered to the IT department, stating the requirement for creating a new server for a particular service.  IT administration to start seeing the servers’ resource pool, matching these resources with the requirements, and starting the provision of the needed virtual machine.  Once provisioned machine started, it is ready to provide the required service according to an SLA, or a time period after which the virtual is being released.

2.2 VIRTUAL MACHINE MIGRATION SERVICES

Migration service, in the context of virtual machines, is the process of moving a virtual machine from one host server or storage location to another; there are different techniques of VM migration, hot/life migration, cold/regular migration, and live storage migration of a virtual machine. In process of migration, all key machines’ components, such as CPU, storage disks, networking, and memory, are completely virtualized, thereby facilitating the entire state of a virtual machine to be captured by a set of easily moved data files. 2.2.1. Migrations Techniques Live Migration and High Availability Live migration (which is also called hot or real-time migration) can be defined as the movement of a virtual machine from one physical host to another while being powered on.  Live migration process takes place without any noticeable effect from the end user’s point of view (a matter of milliseconds).  One of the most significant advantages of live migration is the fact that it facili...

Open SaaS and SOA

A considerable amount of SaaS software is based on open source software.  When open source software is used in a SaaS,  it referred to as Open SaaS.  The advantages of using open source software are that systems are much cheaper to deploy because you don’t have to purchase the operating system or software, there is less vendor lock-in, and applications are more portable.  The popularity of open source software, from Linux to APACHE, MySQL, and Perl (the LAMP platform) on the Internet, and the number of people who are trained in open source software make Open SaaS an attractive proposition.  The impact of Open SaaS will likely translate into better profitability for the companies that deploy open source software in the cloud, resulting in lower development costs and more robust solutions. SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture): SOA is an architectural approach for designing and developing software systems that are composed of loosely coupled services.  In an SO...