Cloud Computing Technologies and Applications

In a nutshell, the existing Internet provides to us content in the forms of videos, emails and information served up in web pages. With Cloud Computing, the next generation of Internet will allow us to “buy” IT services from a web portal, drastic expanding the types of merchandise available beyond those on e-commerce sites such as eBay and Taobao. We would be able to rent from a virtual storefront the basic necessities to build a virtual data center: such as CPU, memory, storage, and add on top of that the middleware necessary: web application servers, databases, enterprise server bus, etc. as the platform(s) to support the applications we would like to either rent from an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) or develop ourselves. Together this is what we call as “IT as a Service,” or ITaaS, bundled to us the end users as a virtual data center. Within ITaaS, there are three layers starting with Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS, comprised of the physical assets we can see and touch: servers, storage, and networking switches. At the IaaS level, what cloud computing service provider can offer is basic computing and storage capability, such as the cloud computing center founded by IBM in Wuxi Software Park and Amazon EC2. Taking computing power provision as an example, the basic unit provided is the server, including CPU, memory, storage, operating system and system monitoring software. In order to allow users to customize their own server environment, server template technology is resorted to, which means binding certain server configuration and the operating system and software together, and providing customized functions as required at the same time. Using virtualization technology, we could provide as little as 0.1 CPU in a virtual machine to the end user, therefore drastically increasing the utilization potential of a physical server to multiple users.