Proc. of the Intl. Conf.

on Advances In Engineering And Technology - ICAET-2014

Copyright Institute of Research Engineers and Doctors. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63248-028-6 doi: 10.15224/ 978-1-63248-028-6-01-03

Capabilities of a cloud
[Prof. R.K.Singh1, Shubhi Jain2, Rohit Kanauzia3]

Abstract- This paper focuses on the functional and non-

functional capabilities of a cloud along with the
environment required for successful execution of cloud
services. It laid stress on how the load is to be handles
while serving the users such as the performance should
not suffer.

Keywords- functional capabilities, non-functional

capabilities, QoS, RoI, overloading, latency challenges

I. Introduction
The term capability can be defined as the capacity to
be used, treated or developed for a specific purpose.
The term cloud can be defined as a scalable
execution environment of resources involving
multiple vendors offering regulated services for a
specified level of quality.
It focuses on how the capabilities/characteristics of
clouds are considered essential for an executing
environment. The capabilities are distinguished in
different aspects addressed by a cloud system i.e.
technological, non-functional and economical
capability.
Non-functional capability- it focuses on the
properties of the system, rather than technological
requirements.
Economic capability- it is the main reason of
consideration for including cloud in the business
models. It lays stress on cost reduction and
outsourcing the services through resource
management.
Technological capability- It is associated directly
with both non-functional and economic aspects of a
cloud but till date we dont have proper standards to
be followed. We are still working on improving the
technology for achieving better and higher level
results.
Fig:1 Capabilities of cloud
II. Non- Functional
Capability
The most important non functional capability in a
cloud computing scenario is discussed below:
1. Elasticity- It focuses on capability of underlying
infrastructure to adapt to changing potentially non-
functional requirements. It can be defined as how the
system adapts to the changing requirements of the
users and scale up the resources without causing any
hindrance in the services provided. Say for an
example A service provider wants to run a website on
a IaaS. At time P single machine is sufficient to serve
the request as the number of users is less. By passage
of time, the site becomes popular and the users
accessing the services increases and it is not possible
for the single machine to access the request. An
elastic system should be able to detect this condition
and provide additional machines from the cloud to
offer services to the users without interrupting the
services.
2. Reliability- It offers constant operation of the
system without any disruption. It ensures that no loss
of data, no code reset during execution etc. should
occur during execution of the system. It is essential to

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 Proc. of the Intl. Conf. on Advances In Engineering And Technology - ICAET-2014
Copyright Institute of Research Engineers and Doctors. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63248-028-6 doi: 10.15224/ 978-1-63248-028-6-01-03

ensure that the system provides reliability for machines while scaling up the system so as to be
continuous operation of the system. green on environment as well while satisfying the
business and users needs.
3. Quality of service- In basic business models,
various metrics are used to determine the services
offered to the users. The different metrics like GOING
GREEN

response time, throughput, security offered, data

availability etc are used to ensure that quality
services are provided to the users of the cloud.
ROI
ECONOMIC PAY PER USE
CAPABILITY
4. Availability- It is one of the core aspect of the
cloud system. It is based on data replicacy so that
even in case of failure the data is easily available. It
COST
aims making the system fault tolerant. With REDUCTION

increasing concurrent access, availability is

particularly achieved through data replication and
distributing them across different resources to
achieving load balancing.
IV. Technological
Capability
ELASTICITY
The most important non functional capability in a
cloud computing scenario is discussed below:
NON-
QUALITY
RELIABILITY
FUNCTION
AL
OF 1. Virtualization- In this vision of virtualization,
SERVICES
CAPABITIES
defined by the Distributed Management Task Force
(DSP2017), applications are delivered as turnkey
AVAILABILI
software, prepackaged with operating systems,
TY
protocol stacks and supporting software. This
approach allows suppliers to thoroughly test the
production configuration of all system software,
III. Economic Capability while customers enjoy simpler installation and
maintenance
1. Cost reduction- It concerns to build up the system
that can adapt to the changing requirements of the 2. Multi-tenancy- With this usage scenario, multiple
system, based on users requirements and reduced independent instances of an application, such as e-
infrastructure and maintenance. mail or web service, can be consolidated on a single
virtualized platform. The instances are then available
2. Pay-per-use- It is the capability of the system to simultaneously to diverse user communities.
build up the cost according to the actual consumption
of resources. It strongly relates to the QoS provided 3. Security- Providing data security is another
by the system. important technical aspect associated with the
technical aspect of the cloud system.
3. Return of Investment- It is an essential aspect for
all the service providers. It ensures that the cost and 4. Data Management- It is an aspect of data storage
efforts invested into the system results into viable since the data is flexibly distributed over the multiple
commercial benefits both to the organization and to resources. Data consistency needs to be ensured
the user as well. while replicating the data over multiple resources.

4. Going Green- It focuses on carbon footprints. It 5. Metering- It focuses on keeping a track of services
keeps a track of carbon emitted by individual accessed by the users since the user need to pay for

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 Proc. of the Intl. Conf. on Advances In Engineering And Technology - ICAET-2014
Copyright Institute of Research Engineers and Doctors. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63248-028-6 doi: 10.15224/ 978-1-63248-028-6-01-03
the services they had accessed. It ensures providing
fair and transparent billing of the utilized services to
the user so as to maintain their trust within the
organization.
VIRTUALIAZATION
MULTI-TENANCY
SECURITY
TECHNOLOGICAL
CAPABILITY
DATA
METERING
MANAGEMENT
V. Handling Service Load
In a cloud environment, service load can potentially
be distributed seamlessly across multiple servers,
locations and cloud providers, with the assistance of
load balancing mechanisms and policies. The
challenge is to satisfy wide-ranging requirements,
such as subscriber affinity, redundancy, latency,
availability, security, capacity. For example,
appropriate load distribution architecture should
consider the number of application instances, their
proximity to end users, and application and data
redundancy. Policies must also be clearly defined, so
service distribution can be managed in accordance
with latency, regulatory and security requirements.
The distance between data centers should be
considered, too, particularly when data exchanges are
frequent and high transactional reliability is required.
Overload control: To handle overload events, our
traditional systems set some threshold values and
then accept or reject the traffic as needed to keep the
system safe and avoid crashing. Cloud computing
environment needs some additional parameters to
share the growing traffic load. Native overload
control mechanisms should also be present to handle
any excess traffic during the interval before scaling
activates and the new instances are sharing the traffic.
In addition, the mechanisms should be there to
manage traffic when the offered load exceeds
maximum elastic capacity.
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Elasticity: It is a powerful mechanism which enables
more efficient use of hardware resources. It can
automatically increase (or decrease) resources
(vertical growth) of a virtual machine or expand
(or reduce) the number of virtual machines
(horizontal growth). Horizontal growth can occur
within the limits of a single data center or grow into
an additional data center. Outgrowth expands
capacity by adding resources in other cloud data
centers.
Effective use of rapid elasticity is based on resource
monitoring, policies and thresholds. Hysteresis (that
is, different growth and shrink thresholds) should be
used to prevent capacity oscillations. To mitigate the
risks associated with rapid elasticity, systems must be
thoroughly tested and cloud-based applications must
be designed to:
Manage scaling and de-scaling
Accurately monitor resource utilization and
performance
Support well-defined policies, backed by
robust trigger mechanisms to control growth
and contraction
Widespread Data Storage: For reliability the data is
stored at multiple resources and managed
continuously so as to survive failure. Now the
question arises to keep the data synchronized. Since
the multiple instances of data is stored and accessed
from variable locations so maintaining the
consistency is another challenge faced by cloud
system. For keeping the data synchronized we can
use ACID approach.
ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation,
durability) properties are essential for
transactional reliability and immediate
consistency. However, they can be resource
intensive and introduce latency into
transactions.
Dealing with latency challenges
 Proc. of the Intl. Conf. on Advances In Engineering And Technology - ICAET-2014
Copyright Institute of Research Engineers and Doctors. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63248-028-6 doi: 10.15224/ 978-1-63248-028-6-01-03

For isochronal applications like video calling, its

crucial to prevent latencies that disrupt service
quality. But with virtualized configurations, resource
contention, real-time notification latency, and
virtualization overhead can all add latency. To
address these issues, architects need to take the
following actions:
Carefully identify the real-time isochronal
expectations for a virtualized platform. For
example, the maximum notification latency
must explicitly represent how late a real-
time notification interrupt can be.
Determine whether the target platform or
infrastructure service can actually meet the
identified requirements.
Establish a recommended architecture and
configuration for optimal isochronous
performance on the specified platform or
infrastructure service.
Prototype and test the service to validate
whether it is technically feasible to meet its
requirements on a virtualized platform.
VI. REFRENCES:
[1] http://www2.alcatel-
lucent.com/techzine/reliable-cloud-computing-key-
considerations/
[2] Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
(EC2):http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?
node=201590011, accessed Dec 2008.
[3] http://www.cca-forum.org/,accessed February
2006.
[4] CONDOR: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/,
accessed May 2008.
[5]Malis, A. (1993), Routing over Large Clouds
(ROLC) Charter, part of the 32nd IETF meeting
minutes - available at
http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/32/charters/rolc-
charter.html
*6+ New York Times (2001), Internet Critic Takes on
Microsoft - available at http://www.
nytimes.com/2001/04/09/technology/09HAIL.html?e
x=1217563200&en=7c46bdefb6a8450a
&ei=5070
*7+ Wikipedia, John McCarthy (computer scientist) -
available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
John_McCarthy_ (computer_scientist)
*8+ Barr, J. (2006), Amazon EC2 Beta - available at
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2006/08/
amazon_ec2_beta.html
*9+ Sutter, H. (2005), The Free Lunch Is Over: A
Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in
Software, in Dr. Dobb's Journal, 30(3).
*10+ Toffler, A. (1980), The Third Wave, Pan Books
[11+ Wikipedia, Cloud Computing - available at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
*12+ Wikinomics, The Prosumers- available at
http://www.socialtext.net/wikinomics/index.cgi?
the_prosumers
*13+ Golden; B. (2009), Capex vs. Opex: Most People
Miss the Point About Cloud Economics -available at
http://www.cio.com/article/484429/Capex_vs._Ope
x_Most_People_Miss_
the_Point_About_Cloud_Economic

About Author:

Ph.D in Electronics Engineering from MNREC,

Allahabad, with more than 20 years experience.

Professor & OSD, Uttarakhand Technical University,

Dehradun, Uttarakhand 248007, INDIA

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