Cloud computing is an increase, use, and delivery model of Internet-based related services, which usually involves the provision of dynamic, easily scalable and often virtualized resources through the Internet.
Cloud is a metaphor for the network and the Internet. In the past, the cloud was often used to represent the telecommunication network in the figure, and later it was also used to represent the abstraction of the Internet and the underlying infrastructure.
In a narrow sense, cloud computing refers to the delivery and use mode of IT infrastructure, which refers to the acquisition of required resources through the network in an on-demand and easy-to-scalable manner; broadly cloud computing refers to the delivery and use mode of services, which refers to the on-demand and easy-to-scalability through network Way to get the services you need. This service can be related to IT and software, the Internet, or other services. It means that computing power can also be circulated through the Internet as a commodity.
Cloud Computing Background
Cloud computing consists of a series of resources that can be dynamically upgraded and virtualized. These resources are shared by all cloud computing users and can be easily accessed through the network. Users do not need to master the technology of cloud computing, only according to personal Or groups need to rent cloud computing resources. Cloud computing is another great change following the big shift from mainframe computers to client-servers in the 1980s.
The emergence of cloud computing is not accidental. As early as the 1960s, McCarthy proposed the concept of providing computing power to users as a utility like water and electricity, which became the origin of cloud computing.
With the support of grid computing in the 1980s, public computing in the 1990s, and virtualization technology, SOA, and SaaS applications at the beginning of the 21st century, cloud computing as an emerging resource use and delivery model has gradually been recognized by academia and industry. China’s Cloud Development and Innovation Industry Alliance evaluated cloud computing as an “innovation in business models in the information age”.
Following the personal computer revolution and the Internet revolution, cloud computing is regarded as the third IT wave and an important part of China’s strategic emerging industries. It will bring about fundamental changes in life, production methods and business models, and cloud computing will become a hot spot of concern for the entire society.
Cloud Computing is the integration of traditional computer and network technology development such as DistributedComputing, ParallelComputing, Utility Computing, Network Storage Technologies, Virtualization, LoadBalance, etc.
The Product Rise
Cloud computing is currently a popular technical term. Many experts believe that cloud computing will change the technological foundation of the Internet and even affect the entire industry structure. Because of this, many large enterprises are studying cloud computing technology and cloud computing-based services. IT international giants such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Dell, and IBM, as well as domestic industries such as Baidu, Ali and Zhuyuntai are among them. Within a few years, cloud computing has developed from an emerging technology to a hot technology today.
From the core document publicly released by Google in 2003 to the commercial application of Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud) in 2006, to the SynapticHosting (dynamic hosting) service launched by the US telecom giant AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph), cloud computing has saved costs From ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to telecommunications companies, they have successfully evolved from built-in IT systems to public services. Cloud computing is a concept that originated in the IT field, IT (Information Technology), that is, information technology, including sensing technology, communication technology, computer technology and control technology.
In the course of technological development, similar to e-commerce, cloud computing is also a relatively vague technical term. One of the reasons is that cloud computing can be used in many application scenarios, and the commercial hype of a large number of companies promotes this trend. Gartner is the world’s most authoritative technology consulting organization. Its technology maturity curve is to analyze the development cycle curve of new technologies based on the technology development cycle theory (it has been reported every year since 1995) to help people judge whether a certain new technology is use.
This curve divides the process of technological maturity into 5 stages:
One is the budding period (Technology Trigger), also known as the perception period, when people begin to perceive new technology products and concepts and show interest;
The second is the Peak of Inflated Expectations (Peak of Inflated Expectations). People rush to adopt this new technology and discuss this new technology. Typical successful cases often add a catalyst to people’s enthusiasm;
The third is the trough of disillusionment, also known as the disillusionment period. Excessive expectations and harsh reality will often extinguish people’s psychological fire;
The fourth is the recovery period (Slope of Enlightenment), also known as the recovery period. People began to reflect on the problem and consider the value of technology from a practical perspective. Quite calmer than before;
The fifth is the maturity period (PlateauofProductivity), also known as the plateau period. This technique has become a commonplace. From the PTZ technology maturity report in 2011, we can see that cloud computing has bypassed application bottlenecks and has begun to truly “landing”.
Cloud computing is like a hurricane sweeping the entire IT industry, and the advantages that come with it are very obvious. 2012 is a year of rapid development of cloud computing. Various cloud technologies and cloud solutions will be introduced one after another, whether it is the early Amazon CloudDrive, the iCloud launched by Apple in 2011, or the SystemCenter that Microsoft will launch in April 2012. The system, etc., have focused on the big “fat” of cloud computing.
Features
By distributing computing on a large number of distributed computers instead of local computers or remote servers, the operation of the enterprise data center will be more similar to the Internet. This enables companies to switch resources to the applications they need, and access computers and storage systems as needed.
It is like changing from the old single generator mode to the centralized power supply mode of the power plant. It means that computing power can also be circulated as a commodity, just like gas, water and electricity, which is easy to access and inexpensive. The big difference is that it is transmitted over the Internet.
Cloud computing has the following main characteristics:
(1) Dynamic resource allocation: Dynamically divide or release different physical and virtual resources according to the needs of consumers. When a demand is increased, the available resources can be increased to match to achieve rapid and flexible provision of resources; if users no longer use these resources, they can be released These resources. The ability of cloud computing to provide customers is unlimited, and it realizes the scalability of IT resource utilization.
(2) Demand service self-service: Cloud computing provides customers with self-service resource services, and users can automatically obtain self-service computing resource capabilities without interacting with providers. At the same time, the cloud system provides customers with a certain application service catalog, and customers can choose service items and content that meet their own needs in a self-service manner.
(3) Taking the network as the center-cloud computing components and overall architecture are connected by the network and exist in the network, and at the same time provide services to users through the network. Customers can use different terminal devices to access the network through standard applications, making cloud computing services ubiquitous.
(4) Services can be quantified: In the process of providing cloud services, according to different service types of customers, automatic control and optimization of resource allocation through metering methods. That is, the use of resources can be monitored and controlled, which is a pay-as-you-go service model.
(5) Pooling and transparency of resources-for cloud service providers, the heterogeneity of various underlying resources (computing, storage, network, resource logic, etc.) (if there is some heterogeneity) Shielding, the boundary is broken, all resources can be uniformly managed and scheduled to become a so-called “resource pool”, so as to provide users with on-demand services; for users, these resources are transparent and infinite, and users do not need to understand Internal structure, just care about whether your needs are met.
Concept
Wiki definition: Cloud computing is a computing model that provides dynamically scalable virtualized resources as a service through the Internet.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines: cloud computing is a pay-per-use model that provides usable, convenient, and on-demand network access and enters a configurable computing resource sharing pool (resources Including network, server, storage, application software, service), these resources can be provided quickly, with little management work or little interaction with service providers. The concept of “cloud computing” is widely used in the production environment. The domestic “Alibaba Cloud” and XenSystem of Cloud Valley, as well as Intel and IBM, which are already very mature abroad, are expanding the scope of services for various “cloud computing” , The influence is immeasurable.
Cloud computing is often confused with grid computing, utility computing, and autonomous computing.
- Grid computing: a type of distributed computing, a super virtual computer composed of a group of loosely coupled computers, commonly used to perform some large tasks;
- Utility calculation: a method of packaging and billing of IT resources, such as calculating costs according to calculation and storage, just like traditional public facilities such as electricity;
- Autonomous computing: A computer system with self-management functions.
In fact, many cloud computing deployments rely on computer clusters (but are very different from the composition, architecture, purpose, and working methods of the grid), and also absorb the characteristics of autonomous computing and utility computing.
Brief history
In 1983, Sun Microsystems proposed the “Network Computer” (“TheNetworkistheComputer”). In March 2006, Amazon launched the ElasticCompute Cloud (EC2) service.
On August 9, 2006, Google* executive Eric Schmidt (EricSchmidt) proposed the concept of “Cloud Computing” (CloudComputing) at the Search Engine Conference (SESSanJose2006)*. Google “cloud computing” originated from the “Google101” project done by Google engineer Christopher Bisilia.
In October 2007, Google and IBM began to promote cloud computing plans on American university campuses, including Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Maryland. This plan Hope to reduce the cost of distributed computing technology in academic research, and provide these universities with related software and hardware equipment and technical support (including hundreds of personal computers and BladeCenter and Systemx servers. These computing platforms will provide 1,600 processors. Support includes Linux, Xen, Hadoop and other open source platforms).
Students can develop various research projects based on large-scale computing through the Internet.
On January 30, 2008, Google announced the launch of the “Cloud Computing Academic Program” in Taiwan. It will cooperate with Taiwan National Taiwan University and Jiaotong University to promote this advanced large-scale and rapid cloud computing technology to campuses.
On February 1, 2008, IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced that it would establish a Cloud Computing Center for Chinese software companies in the Taihu New Town Science and Education Industrial Park in Wuxi, China.
On July 29, 2008, Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard and Intel announced a joint research plan covering the United States, Germany and Singapore to launch a cloud computing research test bed to promote cloud computing. The plan is to work with partners to create 6 data centers as research test platforms, each with 1,400 to 4,000 processors. These partners include the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, the Steinbuch Computing Center of the University of Karlsruhe in Germany, the University of Illinois at Champagne, Intel Research, Hewlett-Packard Labs and Yahoo.
On August 3, 2008, the United States Patent and Trademark Office website information showed that Dell was applying for the “Cloud Computing” (CloudComputing) trademark, a move aimed at strengthening control over this term that may reshape the technical architecture in the future.
On March 5, 2010, Novell and the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) jointly announced a vendor-neutral plan called “Trusted Cloud Initiative (Trusted Cloud Initiative).”
In July 2010, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and supporting vendors including Rackspace, AMD, Intel, Dell and other supporting vendors jointly announced the “OpenStack” open source program. In October 2010, Microsoft expressed support for the integration of OpenStack and WindowsServer2008R2; and Ubuntu has OpenStack was added to version 11.04.
In February 2011, Cisco Systems officially joined OpenStack, focusing on the development of OpenStack network services.
Evolution
Cloud computing has mainly gone through four stages before it has developed to such a relatively mature level. These four stages are power plant mode, utility computing, grid computing and cloud computing in order.
Power plant mode stage:
The power plant mode is like using the scale effect of the power plant to reduce the price of electricity and make it more convenient for users to use, without maintenance and purchase of any power generation equipment.
Utility computing stage:
Around 1960, the price of computing equipment at that time was very high, far beyond the affordable of ordinary enterprises, schools and institutions, so many people had the idea of ​​sharing computing resources. In 1961, McKinsey, the father of artificial intelligence, proposed the concept of “utility computing” at a conference. Its core borrowed from the power plant model. The specific goal was to integrate scattered servers, storage systems and applications to share with multiple users. Allow users to use computer resources as if plugging a light bulb into a lamp holder, and pay according to the amount used. However, since the entire IT industry was still in the early stages of development, and many powerful technologies, such as the Internet, had not yet been born, although this idea has always been praised by people, it is generally “not popular”.
Grid computing stage:
How grid computing research divides a problem that requires huge computing power into many small parts, and then allocates these parts to many low-performance computers for processing, and then combines these calculation results Overcome big problems. Unfortunately, due to the lack of business model, technology and security of grid computing, it has not achieved the expected success in the engineering and commercial circles.
Cloud computing stage:
The core of cloud computing is very similar to utility computing and grid computing. It is also hoped that IT technology can be as convenient as using electricity and at low cost. But unlike utility computing and grid computing, there is already a certain scale in terms of demand, and at the same time it has basically matured in terms of technology.
Service form
Iaas or PaaS
Cloud computing can be considered to include the following levels of services: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). The so-called level here is the “level” in the sense of a layered system architecture. IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS are implemented at the infrastructure layer, software open operating platform layer, and application software layer respectively.
IaaS
IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service): Infrastructure as a service. Consumers can obtain services from a complete computer infrastructure through the Internet.
IaaS money route
Iaas provides users with basic computing resources such as computers (physical machines and virtual machines), storage space, network connections, load balancing, and firewalls through the network; users deploy and run various software, including operating systems and applications, on this basis.
PaaS
PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service): Platform as a service. PaaS actually refers to the software development platform as a service and presented to users in the SaaS model. Therefore, PaaS is also an application of the SaaS model. However, the emergence of PaaS can accelerate the development of SaaS, especially the development of SaaS applications.
The platform usually includes an operating system, a programming language operating environment, a database and a Web server, and users deploy and run their own applications on this platform. Users cannot manage and control the underlying infrastructure, but can only control the applications they deploy.
SaaS
SaaS (Software-as-a-Service): Software as a service. It is a mode of providing software through the Internet. Users do not need to purchase software, but rent Web-based software from providers to manage business activities.
Cloud providers install and run application software in the cloud, and cloud users use the software through a cloud client (usually a web browser). Cloud users cannot manage the infrastructure and platforms on which application software runs, and can only do limited application settings.
ACaaS
ACaaS (AccesscontrolasaService): Access control as a service is an access control based on cloud technology. There are two typical access control as a service in the market today: real cloud service and rack server hosting. A true cloud service is a service with multi-tenant, scalable, and redundant features. It requires the construction of a dedicated data center. Providing a multi-tenant solution is also a complex project, which will lead to high costs. Therefore, most access control systems are Services are still rack server hosting, not true cloud services. Manufacturers who want to find new opportunities in the access control as a service market first need to determine which host solution to provide, how to sell licenses. The position of Cloud Computing Model in the Development of the Internet.
