Cloud Computing: Principles and Paradigms

Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION TO CLOUD COMPUTING

WILLIAM VOORSLUYS, JAMES BROBERG, and RAJKUMAR BUYYA

CLOUD COMPUTING IN A NUTSHELL

When plugging an electric appliance into an outlet, we care neither how electric power is generated nor how it gets to that outlet. This is possible because electricity is virtualized; that is, it is readily available from a wall socket that hides power generation stations and a huge distribution grid. When extended to information technologies, this concept means delivering useful functions while hiding how their internals work. Computing itself, to be considered fully virtualized, must allow computers to be built from distributed components such as processing, storage, data, and software resources [1].

Technologies such as cluster, grid, and now, cloud computing, have all aimed at allowing access to large amounts of computing power in a fully virtualized manner, by aggregating resources and offering a single system view. In addition, an important aim of these technologies has been delivering computing as a utility. Utility computing describes a business model for on-demand delivery of computing power; consumers pay providers based on usage ("pay-as-you-go"), similar to the way in which we currently obtain services from traditional public utility services such as water, electricity, gas, and telephony.

Cloud computing has been coined as an umbrella term to describe a category of sophisticated on-demand computing services initially offered by commercial providers, ...