What is Cloud Computing?

Simply put, cloud computing provides a variety of computing

resources , from servers and storage to enterprise applications
such as email, security, backup/DR, voice, all delivered over the
internet. The cloud delivers a hosting environment that is
immediate, flexible, scalable, secure, and available while
saving corporations money, time and resources.

Delivery Models

SaaS Software as a Service: the consumer uses an application,

but does not control the infrastructure on which it's running (OS,
hardware)

IaaS Infrastructure as a Service: the consumer uses

"fundamental resources" such as processing power, storage,
networking components or middleware. The consumer can
control the operating system, storage, applications and possibly
networking.

PaaS Platform as a Service: the consumer uses a hosting

environment for their applications and has control over the
applications (and some control over the hosting environment),
but does not control the infrastructure on which they are running.

Cloud Computing - Essential

characteristics

Rapid elasticity the ability to scale resources both up and down as

needed. To the consumer, the Cloud appears to be infinite, and the
consumer can purchase as much / little computing power as they need.

Measured service aspects of the Cloud service are controlled and

monitored by the Cloud provider. This is crucial for billing, access control,
resource optimization & capacity planning.

On-demand self service a consumer can use cloud services as needed

without any human interaction with the cloud provider

Ubiquitous network access the Cloud providers capabilities are available

over the network and can be accessed through standard mechanisms.

Resource Pooling allows a Cloud provider to serve its consumers via a

multi-tenant model - resources are (re)assigned according to consumer
demand.

Cloud Computing - deployment

models

Public cloud Infrastructure owned by some organisation but sold

to 3 rd parties E.g. Amazon Web Services, Google AppEngine,
Windows Azure.

Private cloud Internal infrastructure for a single organisation

(on or off-premise) E.g. VMware vCloud, IBM Cloudburst,
Microsoft Hyper-V.

Community cloud Infrastructure shared by several

organisations, targeting a specific community E.g. OpenCirrus
(HP, Intel, Yahoo, KIT, CMU, ).

Hybrid cloud Composition of the above E.g. AWS Virtual

Private Cloud

Cloud computing business

drivers

Business agility

- Faster time to market

No major upfront commitment & investment in infrastructure
- Scalability & elasticity
Instant on-demand provisioning
Shifting the risk of over-/under-provisioning to the cloud provider 2. Focus
Outsource non-core tasks to the cloud provider
3. Pay-as-you-go
Speed up new project launching & rollout (start small, add resources when
needed)
No need for complex planning ahead
Turn fixed costs (CapEx) into variable costs (OpEx)

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