Distributed Computing System: Cloud Computing Research Report

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DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING SYSTEM
CLOUD COMPUTING
RAMAN PAL
(rp5g09@ecs.soton.ac.uk)

M.Sc. Web Technology

School of Electronics & Computer Science
University of Southampton, UK

Abstract: Cloud Computing is one of the
biggest buzz word in the present ICT scenario.
There is no perfectly coined definition for this
word which seems a bit poetic at times.
However, it is referred as service which is
provided over the internet and scalability,
virtualization its resources. Services in cloud
computing are IaaS (Infrastructure as a
Service), SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS
(Platform as a Service). This paper will throw
some light over Cloud Computing, its
applications and the problems which are
associated with it. And will try to suggest
some solutions to obstacles it has in its way.
Keywords: Distributed Computing, Cloud
Computing, IaaS, SaaS, PaaS, etc.
1. Introduction
Cloud computing is a specialized distributed
computing paradigm, which deals with
lending services on a pay-as-you-go basis over
the internet. As per [1] Cloud Computing is
“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.”[1]
Cloud Computing will be one of the many
important milestones in opening the gates
toward the success of Web 3.0.
The roots of this new technology in
Information & Communication Technology
Area can be traced from the evolution of Grid
Computing and Distributed Computing.
Cloud Computing has initiated a new market
of Services over the internet. And the key
players in this market are big shots IT
Companies like: Amazon, Google, Microsoft,
IBM, etc.
Cloud Computing can be considered as a
subset of the grid computing as they share
same technology maintaining the key ethics of
Distributed Computing.
As this technology is now being considered as
one of the most important revolutionising
technology of today’s ICT scenario, it also has
some obstacles lined up in its way to achieve
the glory of becoming a super technology.
Obstacles and research problems like: Data
transfer bottlenecks, Reputation Fate Sharing,
Software Licensing, Data Lock-In, Security,
Data Confidentiality and Performance
Unpredictability. These research problems are
the major obstacles of Cloud Computing
becoming a success.
This paper will explain the Cloud Computing
technology its features, services, application,
will compare the contrast between it to its
predecessors Grid Computing and Distributed
Computing, and will try to suggest some
solutions to the obstacles that are lined up in
front of Cloud Computing Success.
 Distributed Computing System: Cloud Computing Research Report
2. Cloud Computing
The dream of computing as a utility like:
Electricity, Water, Gas, etc. is on the verge of
becoming true with advent of Cloud
Computing as a revolutionising technology in
today’s ICT scenario. Cloud computing as a
technology has immense potential of setting a
benchmark by making the Software more
attractive and lucrative as a service to its
buyers in the IT World.
Defining Cloud Computing
There is no unified definition for Cloud
Computing. Cloud Computing is considered as
a “Collection of scalable virtualized resources,
which is capable of hosting application and
providing required services to the users and
can charge as per the uses like utility. It
provides infrastructure as a service, software
as a service, platform as a service, network as
a service, and data storage as a service. The
main philosophy of cloud computing is to
provide every required things as a service.”[2]
In Cloud Computing the collective effort of
entities like software, hardware and network
play the important role. It provides virtual
server infrastructures for companies. The
intended benefit is that enterprises do not
have to buy their own hardware to provide
services for their customers.
Cloud computing enables developers with
innovative ideas for new Internet services no
longer require the large capital outlays in
hardware to deploy their service or the
human expense to operate it. They need not
be concerned about over-provisioning for a
service whose popularity does not meet their
predictions, thus wasting costly resources, or
under-provisioning for one that becomes
wildly popular, thus missing potential
customers and revenue.
Cloud Computing offers its services by
different means they are: 2
a) Infrastructure as a Service: IaaS refers to
on-demand provisioning of infrastructural
resources, usually in terms of VMs. The cloud
owner who offers IaaS is called an IaaS
provider. Examples of IaaS providers include
Amazon EC2, GoGrid and Flexiscale. [3,8]
b) Platform as a Service: PaaS refers to
providing platform layer resources, including
operating system support and software
development frame works. Examples of PaaS
Providers include Google AppEngine,
Microsoft Windows Azure and Force.com.
[3,8]
c) Software as a Service: SaaS refers to
providing on-demand applications over the
Internet. Examples of SaaS providers include
Salesforce.com, Rackspace and SAP Business
by Design. [3,8]
3. Characteristic features of
Cloud Computing
a) Ultra Large Scale: The cloud is a
largely scaled. Google’s cloud has
owned more than one million servers.
Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo, they
have more than hundreds of
thousands servers. Hundreds of
servers are there in an enterprise.
Cloud enlarges the user’s computing
power.
b) Virtualization: Cloud computing
enables users to get service
anywhere, anytime and through any
kind of terminal. The required
resources come from cloud instead of
visible entity. You can complete all
you want through internet service
using a notebook, desktop terminal or
even a PDA. Users can attain or share
it safely through an easy way,
anytime, anywhere.
 Distributed Computing System: Cloud Computing Research Report
c) High reliability: Data multi-transcript
fault tolerant system is used by
Clouds, the computation node
isomorphism exchangeable and so on
to ensure the high reliability of the
service. Using local desktop terminal
is less reliable than cloud computing.
d) Versatility: Cloud computing doesn’t
aim at certain special application.
Cloud can produce various supported
applications and it can support
different applications running them at
the same time.
e) High extendibility: Dynamic
extensibility can scale the cloud to
meet increasing requirement.
f) On demand service: You can buy or
pay on the go for resources you use
from the large pool of resources
called Cloud; cloud is just like running
water, electric, and gas that can be
charged by the amount that you used.
g) Extremely inexpensive: Because the
cloud’s special fault tolerance can be
built by very inexpensive nodes, the
centered management of cloud make
the enterprise needn’t undertake the
management cost of data center that
increase very fast. The versatility can
increase the utilization rate of the
available resources compared with
traditional system, so users can fully
enjoy the low cost advantage. You can
spend only a few hundred dollars and
a few days to accomplish a task that
you must do it spending thousands of
dollars and several months before.
4. Technologies in Cloud
Computing
Various technologies were combined and
integrated to form the cloud computing. No
single technology was capable enough for the
smooth functioning of Cloud Computing. 3
Technologies such Grid Computing,
Distributed Systems, Virtualization, Web
Services, Service Oriented Architecture,
System Engineering, Utility Computing and
Autonomic Computing. Each of the above
technologies worked together to form a new
technology called Cloud Computing.
Grid Computing: It is also a paradigm of
Distributed Computing System. A common
computational objective is achieved by
coordinating networked resources. Scientific
applications which were computation
intensive led to the development of Grid
Computing. Cloud computing is similar to Grid
computing in that it also employs distributed
resources to achieve application-level
objectives. However, cloud computing takes
one step further by leveraging virtualization
technologies at multiple levels (hardware and
application platform) to realize resource
sharing and dynamic resource provisioning.
Virtualization: Virtualization is a technology
that abstracts away the details of physical
hardware and provides virtualized resources
for high-level applications. A virtualized server
is commonly called a virtual machine (VM).
Virtualization forms the foundation of cloud
computing, as it provides the capability of
pooling computing resources from clusters of
servers and dynamically assigning or
reassigning virtual resources to applications
on-demand.[3]
Utility Computing: Utility computing
represents the model of providing resources
on-demand and charging customers based on
usage rather than a flat rate. Cloud computing
can be perceived as a realization of utility
computing. It adopts a utility-based pricing
scheme entirely for economic reasons. With
on-demand resource provisioning and utility-
based pricing, service providers can truly
 Distributed Computing System: Cloud Computing Research Report

maximize resource utilization and minimize intervention. The goal of autonomic

their operating costs. [3]
Autonomic Computing: Originally coined by
IBM in 2001, autonomic computing aims at
building computing systems capable of self-
management, i.e. reacting to internal and
external observations without human
5. Cloud Computing Architecture
computing is to overcome the management 4
complexity of today’s computer systems.
Although cloud computing exhibits certain
autonomic features such as automatic
resource provisioning, its objective is to lower
the resource cost rather than to reduce
system complexity. [3]

Figure 1: Cloud Computing Architecture [3]

6. Comparing different commercial products for Cloud Computing[3]

 Distributed Computing System: Cloud Computing Research Report

7. Cloud Computing services offered by different service providers[4]

5

8. Research Problems and advancement in the field of Cloud Computing

there are issues and research problems which
Obstacles
are still struggling for a definite solution.
Cloud Computing is relatively new technology
and new developments and researches are a) Data Transfer Bottle Necks:
taking place every day. Even after so much Applications continue to become
 Distributed Computing System: Cloud Computing Research Report
more data-intensive. If we assume
applications may be “pulled apart”
across the boundaries of clouds, this
may complicate data placement and
transport. At $100 to $150 per
terabyte transferred, these costs can
quickly add up, making data transfer
costs an important issue.
Solution/Suggestion: They should deploy
novel data management approaches, such
as analytical data management tasks,
multitenant databases for SaaS, or hybrid
designs among database management
systems (DBMSs) and MapReduce-like
systems so as to address data limitations
and harness cloud computing platforms’
capabilities [7]. Or a combination of
system where manual conventional
methods like FedEx and Advance technical
solutions like online sharing/transfer
should be implemented, depending on
the circumstances and needs of the
system the correct methodology should
be implemented.
b) Reputation Fate Sharing: One
customer’s bad behaviour can affect
the reputation of others using the
same cloud.
Solution/Suggestion: Reputation safe
guarding mechanisms should be
implemented and regular quality
assurance testing should be done.
Feedbacks and User reviews should be
regarded and considered important.
c) Performance Un-predictability:
Studies revealed that multiple virtual
machines (VMs) can share CPU’s and
main memory surprisingly well in
cloud computing, but that network
and disk I/O sharing is more
problematic. As a result, different EC2
instances vary more in their I/O
performance than in main memory
performance. 6
Solutions/Suggestion: Better & improved
Virtual Machines Support. Regular
memories and I/O disks should be
replaced with high performance flash
memories and solid State Drives. Regular
checks and logs should be maintained.
d) Software Licensing: Many cloud
computing providers originally relied
on open source software in part,
because the licensing model for
commercial software is not a good
match to utility computing.
Solution/Suggestion: Software, in a cloud,
becomes a service. To a company like
Microsoft, whose substantial fortunes are
built on software as a purchasable local
application [9]. New licensing model
should be built and implemented, which
will allow users and consumers to use the
software on pay-as-you-go basis. Or new
developments in open source software
should be encouraged in school and
colleges this will result in more and better
software under open source hood.
e) Security, Data Confidentiality: Data
management by the third party
service provider has always been a
issue of concern.
Solutions/Suggestion: Significant amounts
of data which were previously stored only
in individual offices and homes would
now reside in data centers controlled by
third-parties [9]. Better and improved
security mechanisms specially tailored for
the cloud computing application should
be developed. Better encryption
methodologies and Virtual private LANs
and Firewalls should be used.
 Distributed Computing System: Cloud Computing Research Report
f) Business Continuity and Service
Availability: Organizations worry
about whether utility computing
services will have adequate
availability, and this makes some wary
of cloud computing.
Solutions/Suggestion: Use of multiple
cloud computing providers and there
services. Integration among different
Cloud Computing services should be
encouraged and implemented.
g) Data Lock-In: Concern about the
difficulty of extracting data from the
cloud is preventing some
organizations from adopting cloud
computing.
Solution/Suggestion: API’s should be
standardized and use of Hybrid
Computing Cloud should be encouraged
over the user private computing cloud.
New compatible SW should be developed
to enable Surge Control.
h) Scalable Storage: The opportunity,
which is still an open research
problem, is to create a storage system
that would not only meet existing
programmer expectations in regard to
durability, high availability, and the
ability to manage and query data, but
combine them with the cloud
advantages of scaling arbitrarily up
and down on demand.
Solution/Suggestion: New and advanced
storage solutions should be developed which
will be capable of Scaling up and down as per
requirement, without developing any flaw in
its functionality.
i) Cloud Interoperability [7]: Cloud
interoperability refers to customers’
ability to use the same artifacts, such
as management tools, virtual server
images, and so on, with a variety of
cloud computing providers and 7
platforms. Cloud interoperability will
enable cloud infrastructures to evolve
into a worldwide, transparent
platform in which applications aren’t
restricted to enterprise clouds and
cloud service providers. We must
build new standards and interfaces
that will enable enhanced portability
and flexibility of virtualized
applications.
9. Major concern for cloud
computing: Security
Security is one of the largest concerns for the
adoption of Cloud Computing. We outline
seven risks a Cloud user should raise with
vendors before committing [6]:
a) Privileged user access: sensitive data
processed outside the enterprise needs the
assurance that they are only accessible and
propagated to privileged users;
b) Regulatory compliance: a customer needs
to verify if a Cloud provider has external udits
and security certifications and if their
infrastructure complies with some regulatory
security requirements;
c) Data location: since a customer will not
know where her data will be stored, it is
important that the Cloud provider commit to
storing and processing data in specific
jurisdictions and to obey local privacy
requirements on behalf of the customer;
d) Data segregation: one needs to ensure
that one customer’s data is fully segregated
from another customer’s data;
e) Recovery: it is important that the Cloud
provider has an efficient replication and
recovery mechanism to restore data if a
disaster occurs;
 Distributed Computing System: Cloud Computing Research Report

f) Investigative support: Cloud services are
especially difficult to investigate, if this is
important for a customer, then such support
needs to be ensured with a contractual
commitment;
g) Long-term viability: your data should be
viable even the Cloud provider is acquired by
another company.
10. Conclusion:
Cloud computing is an emerging technology in
which every services are available in the
cloud. Cloud is the collection of distributed
computing devices. Cloud computing will
grow with time, so developers should take it
into account. Scalable Software and pay-as-
you licensing model should be considered.
Security policies should be revised and new
policies and trust models should be
developed. Many key challenges in this
domain, including automatic resource
provisioning, power management and security
management, are only starting to receive
attention from the research community.
There is still tremendous opportunity for
researchers to make ground breaking
contributions in this field of study. This paper
presented the state-of-the-art of cloud
computing, covering its essential concepts,
architectural designs, prominent
characteristics, key technologies, comparison
between service providers as well as
discussed and presented many research
challenges and obstacles.
[3] “Cloud computing: state-of-the- art and
research challenges” Q. Zhang, L. Cheng, R. 8
Boutaba
[4] “Cloud Computing–A Classification,
Business Models, and Research Directions”
Prof. Dr. C. Weinhardt, Dr. B. Blau, Dr. J.
Stößer
[5] “A View of Cloud Computing” M.
ArmbruSt, A. Fox, R. Griffith, A. D. Joseph, R.
Katz, A. KonWinski, G. LEE, D. Patterson, A.
Rabkin, I. Stoica, M. Zaharia
[6] “Gartner: Seven cloud-computing security
risks”, J. Brodkin.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/0
70208-cloud.html, 2008.
[7] “Cloud Computing: Distributed Internet
Computing for IT and Scientifc Research” M.
D. Dikaiakos, G. Pallis, D. Katsaros, P. Mehra,
A. Vakali. IEEE Computer Society 2009
[8] “Semantic Computing, Cloud Computing,
and Semantic Search Engine”
P. C-Y SHEU, S. WANG, Q. WANG, K. HAO, R.
PAUL. 2009 IEEE International Conference on
Semantic Computing
[9] “COMPUTING IN THE CLOUDS” A.Weiss

References:
[1] “Cloud Computing and Grid Computing
360-Degree Compared” I. Foster, Y. Zhao, I.
Raicu, S. Lu.

[2] “Cloud Computing: Future solution for e-

Governance” M. Pokharel, J. S. Park