Cloud Computing

Chapter 1

Introduction

The last decades have reinforced the idea that information processing can be done more efficiently centrally, on large farms of computing and storage systems accessible via the Internet. When computing resources in distant data centers are used rather than local computing systems, we talk about network-centric computing and network-centric content. Advancements in networking and other areas are responsible for the acceptance of the two new computing models and led to the grid computing movement in the early 1990s and, since 2005, to utility computing and cloud computing.

In utility computing the hardware and software resources are concentrated in large data centers and users can pay as they consume computing, storage, and ...