Cloud computing principles systems and applications

Cloud computing has emerged very recently as a subject of substantial industrial and academic interest, though its meaning and scope is hotly debated. For some researchers, clouds are a natural evolution towards full commercialisation of Grid systems, while for others they may be dismissed as a mere rebranding of existing pay-per-use technologies. From either perspective, it appears that Cloud is now the label of choice for accountable pay-per-use access to third party applications and computational resources on a massive scale. Clouds are intended to support patterns of less-predictable resource use for applications and services across the IT spectrum, from online office applications to high-throughput transactional services and high-performance computations involving substantial quantities of processing cycles and storage. The current notion of Clouds seems to blur distinctions between a variety of technologies that encompasses Grid Services, Web Services, data centres, platforms, software and infrastructures, and leads to considerations of lowered-cost provisioning for relatively bursty applications for geographically distributed users. Interest in cloud computing, as a concept or system design abstraction, is compounded and further strengthened by an inherent relationship to service-oriented computing.

Download