Cloud computing can be anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. Cloud services are categorized as, Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service or Software as a Service. While, the name cloud, is the symbol used to represent the Internet in various technical and non-technical documents. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a pay-per-use service where a cloud-computing provider offers storage space, network equipment, and virtual servers as consumable resources. Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a platform for the development, deployment and hosting of applications where the final product is delivered to the users via the Web. Software as a Service (SaaS) is when providers provide applications to customers via the Internet as Web services.
Private cloud is an in-house cloud computing solution that is limited to the internal users of an organization. It is more secure and can be later connected with external providers. Public cloud is any commercial cloud computing service provider that offers storage and computing power over the Internet. Hybrid cloud is a cloud model that combines the advantages of public and private cloud computing environments.
Many remote online data backup service providers use public cloud providers as their backend infrastructure. Hence, backed up data is stored at the backend and that is why the backup service provider setup needs to be secure and reliable!
Amazon as one of the first organizations to provide cloud-computing services has become one of the major players. Their setup known as Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows customers to install and run applications on virtual machines (VMs). New VMs are instantiated from a library of images developed by various customers and Amazon themselves. Users can build and customize their own Amazon Machine Images. Running VMs are called running instances and you pay for the amount of computing power per hour and the in/out traffic generated (bandwidth used) while you are billed on monthly basis. Amazon EC2 provides a secure connection with public/private keys and firewall capabilities. Other database and performance/scalability services are provided such as, Simple DB and load balancing functions. Apart from EC2, Amazon has been providing a cloud storage service that provides scalable, unlimited online storage known as S3 that can provide caching functionality across the globe.
Windows Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. The main services consists of the Azure operating system, the SQL Azure database the AppFabric application connectivity service. Although, Microsoft are relatively new to cloud computing, their marketing strength is showing its force even in this area. They have a strong partnership program with its customers and resellers and this will help them become of the main players soon. Their main advantage is that they are offering their vast suite of products as cloud services plus while, on the other hand, they are offering users to run Azure in their own data centers with the Windows Azure platform appliance. Today, Microsoft cloud computing charges are very competitive with respect to other providers.
The long time hosting provider RackSpace are also in the arena! RackSpace Cloud known as Mosso includes a storage and a server infrastructure service while they still offer the traditional hosting services. RackSpace advantage may be their excellent support services when compared to other providers. RackSpace fellow competitors The Planet (Orbit) have a similar cloud setup whereas they claim that their prices are below that of a fully allocated dedicated server. While, this may be true for virtual servers, one has to work out bandwidth costs as in certain situations where a web server consumes a constant amount of bandwidth it might be cheaper to run your web applications on a dedicated server with an agreed dedicated bandwidth! The list of providers is getting bigger and bigger with names like GoGrid, HP Private Cloud, etc…
Google’s App Engine is a platform for web developers and Web hosting applications and you are charged for storage, bandwidth and CPU power. It is limited to a couple of programming languages.
The Cloud Security Alliance is making a great effort towards cloud computing security. To promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within Cloud computing, and provide education on the uses of Cloud Computing to help secure all other forms of computing.
