Cloud Computing Technology: Classification, Application &

Framework
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Its time and again now that my buzzing fingers do not stop boasting about this very internet-prevalence to this day.
Who, in his best dream would have ever thought that he would lend data from a remote cloud one day as he does
water and electricity from the supply line? Goodness! Its pragmatically visible now..!! Cloud Computing is nothing
less than a dream come true with the evolution of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Its rightly said;
Every cloud has a silver lining, but wait, here we have a silver cloud available at our service 24 x 7. Cloud
Computing is the fifth generation of computing after Mainframe, Personal computer, Client-Server computing and
the Web. A cloud is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable
computing resources.

What is Cloud Computing technology?

Cloud computing is a technology that puts your entire computing infrastructure both hardware and software,
applications, etc online. It uses internet and remote, central servers to maintain data and applications. Gmail, Yahoo
mail, Facebook, Hotmail, Orkut, etc are all the most basic and widely used examples of cloud computing. One
does not need his own PC or laptop to check some stored mail/data/photos in the mailbox but any computer with an
internet connection since the data is stored with the mail service provider on a remote cloud. The technology in
essence is a geographical shift in the location of our data from personal computers to a centralized server or cloud.
Typically, cloud services charges its customers on usage basis. Hence it is also called Software as a Service
(SaaS). It aims to provide infrastructure and resources online in order to serve its clients; Dynamism, Abstraction
and Resource Sharing.

History and Evolution:

The term cloud was actually derived from telephony. The telecommunication companies offered Virtual Private
Network with good quality at cheaper rates. The symbol of the cloud represented the demarcation point which was
the sole responsibility of the provider. Cloud computing manages the servers and network infrastructure. In 1977,
Ramnath Chellappa first coined the word cloud computing.

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It is actually difficult to quote the exact history of cloud computing, it being a concept evolved from many other
prevalent techniques of the digital world. It has essentially evolved from various computing technologies like grid
computing, utility computing, parallel computing, and virtualization. The most recent development of cloud
computing has evolved from the Web2.0 technology which caters to web applications that facilitate participatory
information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design etc. Examples of Web 2.0 include wikis, blogs, social
networking sites, video sharing sites etc.

The evolution of cloud computing can be bifurcated into three basic phases:

The Idea Phase - This phase incepted in the early 1960s with the emergence of utility and grid computing and
lasted till pre internet bubble era.

1. The Pre-cloud Phase - The pre-cloud phase originated in the 1999 and extended to 2006. In this phase
internet as the mechanism to provide Application as Service got developed.
2. The Cloud Phase - The much talked about real cloud phase started in the year 2007 when The classification
of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS got formalized. The history of cloud computing has witnessed some very interesting
breakthroughs launched by some of the leading computer/web organizations of the world. The following
picture exhibits the significant applications which triggered the growth of cloud computing.

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This discussion flouts without firm mention to Amazons S3 and EC2. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is an
online storage web service which provides storage through web service interface. It was launched in March 2006.
Similarly, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity
in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.Amazon played a major in the field of
cloud computing. In 2008, Eucalyptus emerged as the first open-source AWS, API-compatible platform for deploying
private clouds. The bourgeoning cloud computing technology fetched further hype when leaders like Google, IBM
and Microsoft entered the arena. IBMs Blue Cloud, Google online App Engine (for ex. online spreadsheets),
Microsofts Azure and Apples icloud are some other energy boosters.

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