CLOUD COMPUTING Principles and Paradigms

CLOUD COMPUTING Principles and Paradigms book PDF free download

PREFACE Cloud computing has recently emerged as one of the buzzwords in the ICT industry. Numerous IT vendors are promising to offer computation, storage, and application hosting services and to provide coverage in several continents, offering service-level agreements (SLA)-backed performance and uptime pro- mises for their services. While these “clouds” are the natural evolution of traditional data centers, they are distinguished by exposing resources (compu- tation, data/storage, and applications) as standards-based Web services and following a “utility” pricing model where customers are charged based on their utilization of computational resources, storage, and transfer of data. They offer subscription-based access to infrastructure, platforms, and applications that are popularly referred to as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and SaaS (Software as a Service). While these emerging services have increased interoperability and usability and reduced the cost of computa- tion, application hosting, and content storage and delivery by several orders of magnitude, there is significant complexity involved in ensuring that applica- tions and services can scale as needed to achieve consistent and reliable operation under peak loads. Currently, expert developers are required to implement cloud services. Cloud vendors, researchers, and practitioners alike are working to ensure that potential users are educated about the benefits of cloud computing and the best way to harness the full potential of the cloud. However, being a new and popular paradigm, the very definition of cloud computing depends on which computing expert is asked. So, while the realization of true utility computing appears closer than ever, its acceptance is currently restricted to cloud experts due to the perceived complexities of interacting with cloud computing providers. This book illuminates these issues by introducing the reader with the cloud computing paradigm. The book provides case studies of numerous existing compute, storage, and application cloud services and illustrates capabilities and limitations of current providers of cloud computing services. This allows the reader to understand the mechanisms needed to harness cloud computing in their own respective endeavors. Finally, many open research problems that have arisen from the rapid uptake of cloud computing are detailed.