CLOUD COMPUTING:

Comparison of Various Features

Nawsher Khan1, A.Noraziah1, Mustafa Mat Deris2, and Elrasheed I.Ismail1
1

Faculty of Computer Systems & Software Engineering, University Malaysia Pahang

2
Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology,
Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia
Phone: +6012-3456789, Fax: +609-87654321
nawsherkhan@gmail.com

Abstract. Cloud computing is fundamentally altering the expectations for how

and when computing, storage and networking resources should be allocated,
managed, consume and allow users to utilize services globally. Due to the
powerful computing and storage, high availability and security, easy
accessibility and adaptability, reliable scalability and interoperability, cost and
time effective cloud computing is the top needed for current fast growing
business world. A client, organization or a trade that adopting emerging cloud
environment can choose a well suitable infrastructure, platform, software and a
network resource, for any business, where each one has some exclusive
features. In this paper, we managed a comprehensive classification for
describing cloud computing architecture. After this classification, easy to
choose a specific cloud service out of several existing cloud computing services
developed by various projects globally such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft,
Sun, force.com etc. Using this survey results not only to identify similarities
and differences of the various aspects of cloud computing, but also identifying
some areas for further research.
Keywords: Cloud Computing, Classification, Virtualization, Large Scale Data.

Introduction

Cloud computing is being heralded as the next-generation shift that combines the
Internet and computing so that software, content and data can be stored in remote
servers run by other companies or by a client and accessed by computers, phones and
TVs through the Internet from anywhere in the world. Many consumers are already
using cloud applications such as Google Earth, Google Docs, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo,
iTunes, Online Operating System, Flicker, Facebook, etc. Hence Cloud computing is
Web-based processing, whereby shared resources, software and information are
provided to computers and other devices on demand over the Internet. Cloud
Computing is hinting at a future in which we wont compute on local computers, but
on centralized facilities operated by third-party compute and storage utilities.
Needless to say, cloud computing is not a new idea. In fact, back in 1961, computing
pioneer John McCarthy predicted that Computation may someday be organized as a
public utility and went on to speculate how this might occur [21].
E. Ariwa and E. El-Qawasmeh (Eds.): DEIS 2011, CCIS 194, pp. 243254, 2011.
Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011

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N. Khan et al.

Cloud Computing is a big revolution in Grid computing. Vision is same for both,
to reduce the cost of computing, increase reliability and increase flexibility by
transforming computers from something that we buy and operate ourselves to
something that is operated by a third party. Now things are different than they were
10 years ago. With the passage of time, we have a new need to analyze huge data,
thus motivating greatly increased demand for computing. We have being spent
multiple billions of dollars by various services i.e. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to
create real commercial large-scale systems containing hundreds of thousands of
computers [1, 2].

Background

Today, the most recent paradigm to emerge is that of Cloud computing, which
promises reliable services delivered to the end-user through next-generation data
centers which are built on virtualized compute and storage technologies [6].
Consumer will be able to access desired service from a Cloud anytime anywhere in
the world on the bases of demand. Computing services need to be highly reliable,
scalable, easy accessible and autonomic to support ever-present access, dynamic
discovery and composability, consumers indicate the required service level through
Quality of Service (QoS) parameters, according to Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
All of these paradigms, the recently emerged Cloud computing paradigm appears to
be the most promising one to leverage and build on the developments from other
paradigms [7].
There are so many definitions of Cloud by various researchers. Ian Foster defines
cloud computing as A large-scale distributed computing paradigm that is driven by
economies of scale, in which a pool of abstracted, virtualized, dynamically-scalable,
managed computing power, storage, platforms, and services are delivered on demand
to external customers over the Internet [3, 1].

Fig. 1. Simple Structure of Cloud Environment

Here are some definitions [4] and Buyya's [5] work defines Clusters and Grid as:
A Cluster is a type of parallel and distributed system, which consists of a
collection of inter-connected stand-alone computers working together as a single
integrated computing resource.

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245

A Grid is a type of parallel and distributed system that enables the sharing,
selection, and aggregation of geographically distributed `autonomous' resources
dynamically at runtime depending on their availability, capability, performance, cost,
and users' quality-of-service requirements.
A Cloud is a type of parallel and distributed system consisting of a collection of
inter-connected and virtualized computers that are dynamically provisioned and
presented as one or more unified computing resource(s) based on service-level
agreements established through negotiation between the service provider and
consumers.
We add yet another definition to the already saturated list of definitions for Cloud
Computing:
A large-scale distributed computing paradigm, which provides Data Storage
Service, Computing Power and Data Transferring Service, with capabilities of
elasticity Software (SaaS), Infrastructure (IaaS), Platform (PaaS), Network
(NaaS), Business (BaaS) and Organization as a Service.
There are two main factors contributing to interests in Cloud Computing:
1.

2.

Rapid reduce in hardware cost and rise in computing power and storage capacity,
and the arrival of multi-core architecture and modern supercomputers consisting
of hundreds of thousands of cores.
The exponentially increasing data size in scientific instrumentation and Internet
publishing and archiving. The wide-spread adoption of Services Computing and
Web 2.0 applications, etc.

Fig. 2. Global Cloud exchange and market infrastructure [7]

For further explanation of the above definitions, we need to discuss the

characteristics and compare Cluster, Grid and Cloud Computing [7].

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Table 1.

Computing Environment / Systems

Characteristics
Clusters

Grids

Clouds

100s

High-End
computers
(Servers,
Clusters)
1000s

100s to 1000s

Limited

Yes, SLA based

Yes, SLA based

User
Management

Centralized

Decentralized and
also virtual
organization
based

Centralized or can be
delegated to third
party

Resource
Management

Centralized

Distributed

Centralized/Distributed

Capacity

Stable and
Guaranteed

Varies, but high

Pricing of
Services

Limited, not
open market

Node Operating
System (OS)

Standard OS
( Windows,
Linux)

Dominated by
public good or
privately assigned
Standard OS
(Dominated
by
Unix)

Failure
Management
(Self-Healing)

Limited
(Often failed
task/application
are restarted)

Limited
(Often failed
task/application
are restarted)

Single
Dedicated,
high-end with
low latency and
high bandwidth

Multiple
Mostly Internet
with high latency
and low
bandwidth
Centralized
indexing and
decentralized info
services

Population
Scalability
Service
Negotiation

Ownership
Interconnection
Network/Speed

Discovery

Commodity
computers

Membership
service

Both and also webbase storage

Demand-base
Provisioned
Utility pricing,
discounted for larger
customers
A hypervisor (VM)
which can run multiple
OSs
Strong support for
failover and content
replication. VMs can
be easily migrated
from one node to
other.
Single
Dedicated, high-end
with low latency and
high bandwidth

Membership services

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247

Table 1. (continued)

Security/
Privacy

Need
Traditional
login, Medium
level of
privacydepends on user
rights

Public/private key
base
authentication and
mapping a user to
an account.
Limited support
for privacy.

Each user/application
is provided with a
virtual machine. High
security/privacy is
guaranteed.

Allocation/
Scheduling

Centralized

Decentralized

Both Centralized/
Decentralized

Standards/
Interoperability

Virtual
Interface
Architecture
(VIA)-based

Some Open Grid

Forum Standards

Web Service
(SOAP and REST
protocols )

Single
Image

Yes

No

Yes, but optional

System

Interworking

Multi-clustering
within an
organization

Application
Drivers

Science,
business,
enterprise,
computing, data
centres

Potential for
Building 3rdParty or ValueAdded Solution

Limited due to
rigid
architecture

Limited
adaptation, but
being explored
through research
efforts such as
Gridbus InterGrid
Collaborative
scientific and high
throughput
computing
applications

Limited due to
strong orientation
for scientific
computing

High potential, third

party solution
providers can loosely
tie together services of
different Clouds
Dynamically
provisioned legacy and
web application,
content delivery
High potential can
create new services by
dynamically
provisioning of
compute, strong and
application services
and offer as their own
isolated or composite
Cloud services to
users.

Generally, we have three types Public and Private Hybrid clouds. When a Cloud is
made available in a Pay-As-You-Go manner to the public, we call it a Public Cloud,
the service being sold as Utility Computing. Current examples of Public Utility
Computing are Amazon Web Services, Google AppEngine and Microsoft Azure. We
use the term Private Cloud to refer to internal datacenters of a business or other
organization that are not made available to the public. Hybrid is the combination of
both. Thus, Cloud Computing is the sum of SaaS and Utility Computing, but does not
normally include Private Clouds. The advantages of SaaS to both end-users and

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N. Khan et al.

service providers are well understood. Service providers enjoy greatly simplified
software installation and maintenance and centralized control over versioning and
end-users can access the service anytime, anywhere, share data and collaborate
more easily, and keep their data stored safely in the infrastructure. [5, 7].
The vision of computing utility based on the service provisioning model anticipates
the massive transformation of the entire computing industry in the 21st century
whereby computing services will be readily available on demand, like other utility
services available in todays society. Similarly, computing service users (consumers)
need to pay providers only when they access computing services. In addition,
consumers no longer need to invest heavily or encounter difficulties in building and
maintaining complex IT infrastructure. Hence, software practitioners are facing
numerous new challenges toward creating software for millions of consumers to use
as a service, rather than to run on their individual computers [7, 18].

Importance, Needs and Expectation of Cloud

Gartner Executive Programs Worldwide Survey of More Than 2,000 CIOs Identifies
Cloud Computing as Top Technology Priority for CIOs in 2011. According to Mr.
McDonald "The resource realities indicated in the 2011 CIO Agenda Survey raise the
urgency and importance of adopting new infrastructure and operations technologies,
such as cloud services and virtualization. These technologies were selected by CIOs
the most often and the top-two technologies for 2011 and are well-suited for this
budget reality, as they offer similar service levels at lower budget costs." [19]. The
vision of cloud, in very near future, will decrease the density of hardware and user
will be able to access any service just through one screen, because cloud will provide
all software as well as hardware services.
Figure 3:
2011Hype Cycle for
Emerging Technologies

Failure of Cloud

Cloud computing provides so many services (SaaS). Anything can be a SaaS,

therefore anything can be a cloud. Cloud will never go down, but a service can.

CLOUD COMPUTING: Comparison of Various Features

249

When Gmail or some other hosted service has an interruption, it does not indicate a
cloud failure, its a service failure. Providers such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft,
Salesforce.com, IBM and Sun Microsystems have begun to launch new data centers
for hosting Cloud computing applications in various locations around the world to
provide redundancy and ensure reliability in case of site failures [5, 7]. This research
gives the following table with more detail with duration about the outage of various
services of cloud. Table 2.
Table 2. Outage in Cloud

Duration
Hours/Minutes

Date

Twitter

24 h

Dec 6-7, 2010

Gmail and AppEngine

2.5 h

Feb 24, 2009

Google Search Engine

40 m

Jan 31, 2009

Microsoft Azure

22 h

Mar 13-14, 2008

Gmail

1.5 h

Aug 11, 2008

AppEngine

5h

Jun 17, 2008

Simple Storage System

2h

Feb 15, 2008

Simple Storage System

6-8 h

Jul 20, 2008

FlexiScale

18 h

Oct 31, 2008

Amazon S3

1.5 h

Feb 15, 2008

Service

Cloud Services

Cloud computing can provide three kinds of services, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. SaaS
means the service provided to client is the applications running on the cloud
computing infrastructure. It can access by thin client interfaces such as browser etc.
PaaS refers to deploy the applications created by the development language and tool
say Java, python, .net etc. provided by the service providers to the cloud
infrastructure. IaaS refers to the services provided to the users is to lease the
processing power, storage, transpiring, network and other basic computing resources,
with which users can deploy and run any software including operating systems and
applications. To all these services, there is no need for users to manage or control the
cloud infrastructure, including network, server, operating system, storage and even
the functions of applications.
5 .1

Cloud Infrastructure as a Service ( IaaS )

Computing is being transformed to a model consisting of services that are

commoditized and delivered in a manner similar to traditional utilities such as water,

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N. Khan et al.

electricity, gas, and telephony. In such a model, users access services based on their
requirements without regard to where the services are hosted or how they are
delivered. Several computing paradigms have promised to deliver this utility
computing vision and these include cluster computing, Grid computing, and more
recently Cloud computing. Thus, the computing world is rapidly transforming
towards developing software for millions to consume as a service, rather than to run
on their individual computers [7, 17]. IPs manages a large set of computing resources,
such as storing and processing capacity. Through virtualization, they are able to split,
assign and dynamically resize these re-sources to build ad-hoc systems as demanded
by customers as well as SPs. They deploy the software stacks that run their services,
which is the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) scenario [8, 9, 17].
At present, it is common to access content across the Internet independently
without reference to the underlying hosting infrastructure. This infrastructure consists
of data centers that are monitored and maintained around the clock by content
providers. Cloud computing is an extension of this paradigm wherein the capabilities
of business applications are exposed as sophisticated services that can be accessed
over a network. Cloud service providers are incentivized by the profits to be made by
charging consumers for accessing these services. Consumers, such as enterprises, are
attracted by the opportunity for reducing or eliminating costs associated with inhouse provision of these services. However, since cloud applications may be crucial
to the core business operations of the consumers, it is essential that the consumers
have guarantees from providers on service delivery. Typically, these are provided
through Service Level Agreements (SLAs) brokered between the providers and
consumers [7].
Providers such as Amazon, Google, Salesforce, IBM, Microsoft, Sun
Microsystems and GigaSpace have started to establish new data centers for hosting
cloud computing applications in various locations around the world to provide
redundancy and ensure reliability in case of site failures. Since user requirements for
cloud services are varied, service providers have to ensure that they can be flexible in
their service delivery while keeping the users isolated from the underlying
infrastructure. Recent advances in microprocessor technology and software have led
to the increasing ability of commodity hardware to run applications within Virtual
Machines (VMs) efficiently [9, 11].
5.2

Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) Features

In our Global village, there are various cloud computing platforms; each has its own
characteristics and advantages. For better understanding, we analyze these platforms
and give comparison from different implementation aspects. Table 3. [9].
User requirements for cloud services are varied, service providers have to ensure
that they can be flexible in their service delivery while keeping the users isolated from
the underlying infrastructure. Recent advances in microprocessor technology and
software have led to the increasing ability of commodity hardware to run applications
within Virtual Machines (VMs) efficiently. VMs allow both the isolation of
applications from the underlying hardware and other VMs and the customization of
the platform to suit the needs of the end-user.

CLOUD COMPUTING: Comparison of Various Features

251

PaaS offerings may include facilities for application design, development, testing,
deployment and hosting as well as application services such as team collaboration,
web service integration and database integration, marshalling, scalability, security,
persistence, storage, application versioning, state management, application
instrumentation and developer community facilitation. These services are provisioned
as an integrated solution over the web [8].
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 [17]. This is denoted as Platform as a Service (PaaS) i.e.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Google Apps Engine, Microsoft Azure, Sun
Network.com (Sun Grid) and GRIDS Lab Aneka etc.
Table 3. Comparison of Some Cloud Computing Platforms
Different Platforms
Property

Focus

Amazon
Google
Microsoft
Elastic Compute
App Engine Azure
Cloud (EC2)
Infrastructure

Compute,
Service Type Storage
(Amazon S3)
Virtualization

Platform

Platform

Web
Application

Web
and
non-web
application
OS
level
OS level running
Application through
on a Xen
container
fabric
hypervisor
controller

Sun
Network.com
(Sun Grid)

GRIDS Lab
Aneka

Infra-structure

Enterprise
clouds

Compute

Compute

Job
management
system
(Sun
Grid Engine)

Resource
manager
and
scheduler

Dynamic
negoti-ation
of QoS

None

None

None

None

SLA-base
resources
reservation

Web APIs

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes
Work-

Amazon
EC2 Web-based Microsoft
User Access
command-line
administrati windows
interface
tools
on
azure portal

scripts,
Sun
bench, webGrid web portal

Value-added
service
providers

Yes

Yes

Yes

Programming
frame-work

Amazon
Machine Images Python
(AMI)

Microsoft.N
ET

Solaris
OS.
supporting
Java, C, C++,
models in
FORTRAN

No

based portal
No
APIs

c# .Net

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N. Khan et al.

Cloud Software as a Service ( SaaS )

Saas offers the fastest time to value for generic business processes. SaaS is most
appropriate for those business areas where the processes are standardized. In many
cases, however, these processes are different because they are actually substandard.
If businesspeople would adopt standardized business processes and the pre-built SaaS
packages that can automate those standardized processes, they would significantly
improve their business. In those cases where the data is too sensitive to trust offsite
with a SaaS vendor, then the SaaS application often can be hosted within the
enterprises data center. SaaS is a part of cloud computing, and enterprises should
consider internal, private and public options for cloud computing, as their security
requirements dictate [7].
Finally, there are services of potential interest to a wide variety of users hosted in
Cloud systems. This is an alternative to locally run applications. An example of this is
the online alternatives of typical office applications such as word processors. This
scenario is called Software as a Service (SaaS) [9, 17].

Pricing Structure

Several Cloud Computing and Conventional Computing datacenters are being built in
seemingly surprising locations, such as Quincy, Washington (Google, Microsoft,
Yahoo! etc) and San Antonio, Texas (Microsoft, US National Security Agency etc).
The motivation behind choosing these locales is that the costs for electricity, cooling,
labor, property purchase costs and taxes are geographically variable and of these
costs, electricity and cooling alone can account for a third of the costs of the
datacenter. Even prices are changing, but we compare currently prices below.
As a successful example, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) from Amazon Web
Services (AWS) sells 1.0-GHz x86 ISA slices for $0.10 per hour, and a new slice
or instance can be added in 2 to 5 minutes. Amazons Scalable Storage Service (S3)
charges $0.12 to $0.15 per GB/Month, with additional bandwidth charges of $0.10 to
$0.15 per GB to move data IN and OUT of (AWS) over the Internet. Table 4.
Table 4. Platforms Pricing Structure

Amazon

0.055

Transfe
r
$/GB
0.10

Google

0.150

0.11

0.100

Microsoft

0.150

0.13

0.120

Platforms

Storage
$/GB/Month

CPU
$/GHz/
h
0.100

Conclusion and Lights to the Future

Cloud Computing is the fifth utility after water, electricity, gas and telephony, and it
is the promising paradigm for delivering IT services as computing utilities. This paper

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253

present a comprehensive comparison of different aspects of cloud computing. After

this analysis user can better understand the characteristic and will be able to do better
selection of cloud platform, implementation and deployment requirement. In current
cloud still we have challenges i.e. continuously availability, portability, consistency
guaranty, data security and privacy. In current cloud environment, user cant fine the
status of their data may be someone is using these data for his/her own purposes and
also if server goes down for an hour, users are hit with the crises and user are
handicapped.
Our future work lies in the areas of data replication and data scheduling in cloud
computing as well as on the combination of these both, replication and scheduling
techniques.

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