Cloud computing

Cloud Computing:
Cloud computing is an Internet based service delivery architecture which enables us to use third party resources on pay per use basis. The need of having third party High performance computing features with flexible demand and lower cost gives rise to the technologies like Cloud Computing.

Cloud Computing is a computing paradigm which is based on the usage of pooled resources via Internet. It delivers on-demand IT services to users on pay-per-use basis i.e. at a much lower cost.
You have to pay for what and how much you use. Cloud computing enable the end user to focus only on Operational expenditures rather than Capital Expenditures. It offers reduced investment, expected performance (that is why it is high performance computing), high availability, scalability, accessibility and mobility (accessible from anywhere) and many more services. 

Cloud computing is no new technology but a new delivery method. As a user of cloud computing you just need to have a computer system connected with Internet to enjoy everything on cloud on pay-per-use basis. There are plenty of cloud service providers like IBM, Amazon, Microsoft and many more...
You may also be interested to get the technical aspects of being a cloud provider. As a cloud provider you need to design data centers, broker policies, various servers in distributed manner, hypervisors and various Virtual machine usage policies. So from the research perspective, cloud computing still have huge scope including the need of work in designing better scheduling algorithms, energy efficient datacenter designing, effective resource utilization model, green computing and higher security models with low complexity to name a few. 

        Before going to start research on Cloud computing we must first understand what it actually stands for? What is its basic concept? What is "Anything as a Service" model. What is the core of cloud computing? Virtualization is the concept which lies in the core of cloud computing. You can achieve virtualization with the help of various hypervisors or virtual machine manager (VMM). 

A virtual Machine (VM) can be defined as a software based machine emulation technique to provide a desirable, on-demand computing environment for users. It is completely independent of any base operating system and complete in itself to finish a task.

Main Characteristics of cloud computing:

• Cloud computing provides on demand services to the clients without any human interaction at service provider‟s site.
• Cloud computing provides large pool of resources to the client to use as utility computing.
• Cloud computing provides elasticity in its services which lets a user to have as much or as little of a service as they want at any instant of time.
• The service offered by cloud computing are fully managed by the provider. The user doesn't need to concern about that. The only thing the user has to do is to use the services pay as per the usage, nothing more.

To start research on cloud using cloudsim tool, you must understand some basic concepts including cloudlet, broker, datacenters, schedulers, and virtual machines. All these and other components are desinged in java for research purpose in cloudsim as well as CloudAnalyst.

As shown in the screenshot above, CloudAnalyst allows you to code in java to simulate your cloud environment, it gives you visual effects of your simulation and also gives you results in the form of report which you can easily export as pdf to be used in your research work.

To configure a cloud storage environment like dropbox at your end you can start with owncloud.

If you want to work on scheduling and load balancing algorithms, you can also go for python based tool "Haizea". Haizea provides three modes of operation: Simulation mode, Real-time mode, and Open-Nebula mode. Haizea lets you schedule the workload in any of the "Best Effort", "DeadLine Sensitive", "Immediate", and "Advance Reservation" ma"Anything as a Service" model.nner. You will have to be handy with python to work with Haizea tool.

When we talk about Industry level implementation of  cloud services, there are many big giants like OpenStack, Salesforce, AWS and many more. AWS stands for Amazon Web Services. Its a proprietary platform from Amazon. Like that many other platforms are available as Microsoft Azure. Now the move is towards adopting open source platforms to come out of vendor lock in cloud computing. Openstack and Open-Nebula are name of open source cloud computing platforms. Working knowledge of python will do good in you want to be the part of coming world of Cloud Computing.

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