VARIOUS APPROACHES FOR CLOUD COMPUTING

Kapil Tomar Department of Information Technology IIMT Engineering College at Meerut UPTU, Lucknow, UP, INDIA kkapiltomar@gmail.com Ravikant Assistant Professor IIMT Engineering College at Meerut UPTU, Lucknow, UP, INDIA

Abstract
Cloud computing provides alternatives to the information technology departments for computation at improved flexibility and lower cost. These services are readily accessible on a pay-per-use basis and offer great alternatives to businesses that need the flexibility to rent infrastructure on a temporary basis or to reduce capital costs. Cloud Computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the datacenters that provide those services. In this paper we present an overview of the cloud computing, various categories of cloud currently in use or emerging in the near future i.e. public clouds, private clouds and hybrid clouds. We also present architectural considerations of clouds namely Cisco cloud reference architecture, enterprise private cloud architecture by Oracle, and enterprise public cloud architecture by Infosys.

Keywords: Cloud Computing, Application, Service, Security

VARIOUS APPROACHES FOR CLOUD COMPUTING

Kapil Tomar Department of Information Technology IIMT Engineering College at Meerut UPTU, Lucknow, UP, INDIA kkapiltomar@gmail.com Ravikant Assistant Professor IIMT Engineering College at Meerut UPTU, Lucknow, UP, INDIA Abstract
Cloud computing provides alternatives to the information technology departments for computation at improved flexibility and lower cost. These services are readily accessible on a pay-per-use basis and offer great alternatives to businesses that need the flexibility to rent infrastructure on a temporary basis or to reduce capital costs. Cloud Computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the datacenters that provide those services. In this paper we present an overview of the cloud computing, various categories of cloud currently in use or emerging in the near future i.e. public clouds, private clouds and hybrid clouds. We also present architectural considerations of clouds namely Cisco cloud reference architecture, enterprise private cloud architecture by Oracle, and enterprise public cloud architecture by Infosys. Keywords: Cloud Computing, Application, Service, Security

1. Introduction
Cloud Computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the datacenters that provide those services. The services themselves have long been referred to as Software as a Service (SaaS), [1]. The datacenter hardware and software is called a Cloud. 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 is Utility Computing [1]. Current examples of public Utility Computing include AmazonWeb Services, Google AppEngine , and Microsoft Azure. The term Private Cloud is used to refer to internal datacenters of a business or other organization that are not made available to the public. Thus, Cloud Computing is the sum of SaaS and Utility Computing, but does not normally include Private Clouds [1]. Service providers enjoy greatly simplified software installation and maintenance and centralized control over versioning; end users can access the service anytime, anywhere, share data and collaborate more easily, and keep their data stored safely in the infrastructure. Cloud Computing does not change these arguments, but it does give more application providers the choice of deploying their product as SaaS without provisioning a datacenter. Cloud Computing allows deploying SaaS and scaling on demand, without building or provisioning a datacenter. Cloud is designed to be available everywhere, all the time. By using redundancy and geo replication, cloud is so designed that services be available even during hardware failures including full data center failures [1]. IT resources and services that are abstracted from the underlying infrastructure and provided on-demand and at scale in a multitenant environment [3]. Here on-demand means that resources can be provisioned immediately when needed, released when no longer required, and billed only when used. At-scale means the service provides the illusion of infinite resource availability in order to meet whatever demands are made of it.And Multitenant environment means that the resources are provided to many consumers from a single implementation, saving the provider significant costs [3]. In the Cisco point of view [3], all three attributes are required to be considered as a cloud service. Other point to note is that the physical location of resources (On-premise or off-premise) is not a part of the definition. Now we presents various categories of clouds.

2. Cloud Computing Infrastructure Model

There are three categories of cloud currently in use or emerging in the near future: Public Clouds, Private Clouds and Hybrid Clouds [1], as shown in figure 1. i. Public Clouds: Public clouds are stand-alone, or proprietary, clouds mostly offpremise, run by third party companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others. Public clouds are hosted off customer premises and usually mix applications (transparently) from different consumers on shared infrastructure [3]. ii. Private Clouds: Private clouds are typically designed and managed by an IT department within an organization. A private cloud is usually built specifically to provide services internally to an organization. Private clouds may be in a collocated facility or in an existing data center. This model gives a high level of control over the cloud services and the cloud infrastructure. Cisco has a strong portfolio of solutions, products, and services, which enable private cloud infrastructures [3].iii. Hybrid Clouds: Hybrid clouds are basically a combination of Public and Private Clouds. To meet the benefits of both approaches, newer execution models have been developed to combine public and private clouds into a unified solution. Applications with significant legal, regulatory or service level concerns for information can be directed to a private cloud. Other applications with less stringent regulatory or service level requirements can leverage a public cloud infrastructure [1].

3. Architectural Considerations of Clouds

When an Organization want to adopt Cloud Computing. Then organization evaluates the Cloud Computing architecture. So that it can find out that how many goals can achieved by after adopting a particular cloud computing architecture. Some architectures by well known players of this field are given below.

3.1 Cisco Cloud Reference Architecture

As part of the cloud data center build-outs, Cisco is bringing some key frameworks, architecture, and building blocks to the industry. Cisco [3] has developed the depiction (shown in Figure 2) of a cloud reference architecture model, which portrays the architectural layers, connected via APIs and repositories. At the foundation of this framework is the data center technology architecture, which consists of three salient blocks of network, compute, and storage [3]. This layer hosts all the services that are delivered to a cloud consumer or subscriber. The next important layer is the security layer. The key takeaway in this layer is that security is blanketed as an end-to-end architecture across all aspects of the framework. Security is considered as one of the key challenges to be solved in a cloud framework; hence, it has to be accounted for in a comprehensive sense. Following the technology and security layer is the Service Orchestration layer, which is implemented

with configuration repository enablers. The configuration repository stores key information such as service catalogue, asset inventory, and resource-to-service mappings. This layer is an important layer because it maps the technology components to the service components and serves as a reference point during service provisioning. The service orchestration layer is the glue that integrates the lower layers to create a service for delivery. The next layer is also where infrastructure and service management function take place. The topmost layer is the consumer-facing layer, usually exposed via a portal-like solution. This is the layer where service is defined, requested, and managed by the consumer [3].A use case scenario where this framework is utilized is as follows [3]. i. Consumer logs on to a cloud portal and verifies/updates credentials and information. ii. Based on the consumer entitlement, a selected a set of services are identified and presented for definition. iii. The end-user selects the service for consumptions and triggers a service provisioning request. iv. Resources are marked as reserved for service, and a new request is created for services provisioning. v. The individual domains of compute, network, and storage are configured and provisioned, with requested security and service-level agreements (SLAs), for service delivery. Hence, this framework provides a working structure to create, define, orchestrate, and delivery IT service via a cloud. Cisco provides not only this framework, but also key solutions to deliver cloud services.

3.2 Enterprise Private Cloud Architecture by Oracle

As shown in below figure 3, Cloud computing offers three types of services [6], Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) . These levels support virtualization and management of differing levels of the solution stack. And these are delivered on demand basis to the consumer. The three major services in the cloud computing environment are [6]: Software as a Service (SaaS) is where application services are delivered over the network on a subscription and on-demand basis. A SaaS provider typically hosts and manages a given application in their own data center and makes it available to multiple tenants and users over the Web. Cisco

WebEx, Salesforce.com, Microsoft, Oracle, Netsuite and Google are well known SaaS providers [6].

Platform as a Service (PaaS) consists of run-time environments and software development

frameworks and components delivered over the network on a pay-as-you-go basis. PaaS offerings are typically presented as API to consumers. It facilitates development and deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying infrastructure, 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. This platform consists of infrastructure software, and typically includes a database, middleware and development tools. Google Apps Engine,Amazon Web Services, force.com, Coghead, and CiscoR WebEx Connect are the examples of PaaS providers [6]. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is where compute, network, and storage are delivered over the network on a pay-as-you-go basis. Unlike PaaS services, IaaS provider does very little management other than keep the data center operational and users must deploy and manage the software services themselves--just the way they would in their own data center. Amazon pioneered this with AWS (Amazon Web Service), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Secure Storage Service (S3) are examples of IaaS offerings [6].

3.3 Enterprise Public Cloud Architecture by Infosys

This model appeals especially to startups and small organizations that have not invented in hardware resources and are looking for ways to avoid the large capex involved in procuring infrastructure upfront. Even though there are several benefits like cost savings, faster time to market etc., from this model, there are a few challenges listed below that are preventing wide scale adoption of public clouds [2]. Security: The biggest roadblock is the potential security issues due to multitenant nature of public clouds. There are security and privacy concerns with sharing same physical hardware with unknown parties that need to addressed.

 Reliability and Performance: Performance and availability of the applications are important criteria
defining the success of an enterprises business. However, the fact that organizations lose control over IT environment and important success metrics like performance and reliability, and dependent on factors outside the control of the IT organizations make it dangerous for some mission critical applications [2]. Vender Lock-in: Cloud computing services offered by different vendors are not governed by any standards as of today. Depending on the vendor. The applications have to undergo changes to adapt to the service. Leveraging Existing Investment: Most large organizations that have already invested in their own data centers would see a need to leverage those investments as an important criterion in adopting cloud computing. Corporate Governance and Auditing: Performance governance and auditing activities with the corporate data abstracted in the public cloud poses challenges that are yet to be addressed. Maturity of the Solutions: Some of the PaaS offering like AppEngine offer limited capabilities like only a subset of JDO API.

3.3.1 Typical Use Cases for Public Clouds

Some of the initial services that can be moved into public cloud are those that are not business or mission critical or do not deal with the sensitive data. Some of the typical use cases where public clouds can be leveraged include. BPOs: Business Productivity Online (BPO) suite applications are one of the first application of public clouds in enterprises. There are several vendor offerings like exchange online and Google Apps that offer messaging and collaboration software as Services on subscription model that can reduce the overheads associated with maintaining such application on premises [2]. Data Backup and Archival: Cloud storage is cheaper and offer storage on demand. So, enterprises are looking at public cloud storage solutions for their data backup and archival needs. Internet Content Management: Contents that needs to be accessible from the internet like product literature, etc., can be stored in public cloud storage solution. Amazon Offers S3 for storage and cloud front for CDN that increases the efficiency of delivering such content [2].Organizations should build a cloud computing stack that helps them adopt this shybrid approach efficiently. The recommended cloud computing

stack with the various layers and various components needed for managing the cloud, developing and deploying enterprise application and maintaining the applications using the cloud computing environment. The cloud computing stack fig 4consists three layers i.e. Cloud Application Layer, Cloud Plateform Layer and Cloud Infrastructure Layer. The Cloud Application Layer consists of SaaS applications developed using the cloud platform services like CRM SaaS Application, Financial Service Application, Healthcare Service Application, Community Portal etc [2]. The Cloud Platform Layer provide the specialized frameworks like a multi-tenant web framework for developing web based applications, analytics and batch frameworks based on Map Reduce algorithms, cloud based social commerce framework, etc [6]. The Cloud Infrastructure Layer provides the core middle ware capabilities like compute, storage, data stores, messaging, etc., as on demand services. These use the infrastructure from public and private clouds and provide abstractions for the platform and application services.

4. Conclusion
Cloud computing offers real alternatives to IT departments for improved flexibility and lower cost. Markets are developing for the delivery of software applications, platforms, and infrastructure as a service to IT departments over the cloud. These services are readily accessible on a pay-per-use basis and offer great alternatives to businesses that need the flexibility to rent infrastructure on a temporary basis or to reduce capital costs. Architects in larger enterprises find that it may still be more cost effective to provide the desired services in-house in the form of private clouds to minimize cost and maximize compatibility with internal standards and regulations. If so, there are several options for future-state systems and technical architectures that architects should consider to find the right trade-off between cost and flexibility. Any architectural framework will help architects evaluate these trade-offs within the context of the business architecture and design a system that accomplishes the business goal. We can customize the above architectures according to our organization / customers needs, so that enterprise architects can help the customers to discover a cloud roadmap that works for them.

References
1. Rahul Bakshi, Deepak John, Cloud Computing : Pinnacle of IT Infrastructure Democratization, SET Labs Briefings Advisory Board, A White Paper, Vol 7, Nov 2009,www.infosys.com/research/publications/Documents/cloud-computing.pdf 2. Shyam Kumar Doddavula and Amit Wasudeo Gawande, Adopting Cloud Computing Enterprise Private Cloud, Vol 7 Nov 2009, http://www.infosys.com/research/publications/setlabs-briefings/Documents/cloudcomputingenterprise- private-clouds.pdf 3. Cisco Cloud Computing Data Center Strategy, Architecture and Solutions, Point of View, Cisco System, Inc., 2009, White Paper For US Public Sector http://www.cisco.com/web/strategy/docs/gov/CiscoCloudComputing_WP.pdf 4. Michael Armbrust, Armando Fox, Rean Griffith, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy Katz, Andy Konwinski, Gunho Lee, David Patterson, Ariel Rabkin, Ion Stoica, and Matei Zaharia, February 10, 2009, Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing, UC Berkeley Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory, http://radlab.cs.berkeley.edu 5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing 6. Oracle White Paper in Enterprise Architecture, Architectural Strategies for Cloud Computing, August 2009, www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/entarch/index.html.