The Cloud Computing Framework
Dr Tom Leighton, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, Akamai Technologies provides a framework that gives structure to the different offerings in the cloud computing space
As one of the hottest concepts in IT today, ‘cloud computing’ proposes to transform the way IT is consumed and managed, with promises of improved cost efficiencies, accelerated innovation, faster time-to-market, and the ability to scale applications on demand. While the market is abundant with hype and confusion, the underlying potential is real—and is beginning to be realized.
In particular, SaaS applications and public cloud platforms have already gained traction with small and startup businesses. These offerings enable companies to gain fast, easy, low-cost access to systems that would otherwise cost them millions of dollars to build. At the same time, cloud computing has drawn the cautious but serious interest of larger enterprises in search of its benefits of efficiency and flexibility.
However, as companies begin to implement cloud solutions, the reality of the cloud itself comes to bear. Most cloud computing services are accessed over the Internet, and thus fundamentally rely on an inherently unpredictable and insecure medium. In order for companies to realize the potential of cloud computing, they will need to overcome the performance, reliability, and scalability challenges the Internet presents.
Understanding The Cloud
Simply defined, cloud computing refers to computational resources (‘computing’) made accessible as scalable, on-demand services over a network (the ‘cloud’). And yet, cloud computing is far from simple. It embraces a confluence of concepts—virtualization, service-orientation, elasticity, multi-tenancy, and pay-as-you-go—manifesting as a broad range of cloud services, technologies, and approaches in today’s marketplace.
To facilitate our discussion of this diverse marketplace, we first lay out a framework that gives structure to the different offerings in the cloud computing space. We will also explore the role of public and private clouds in the marketplace.
The Cloud Computing Framework
Our cloud computing framework has five key components. The first, virtualization technology, can be thought of as an underpinning of cloud computing. By abstracting software from its underlying hardware, virtualization lays the foundation for enabling pooled, shareable, just-in-time infrastructure. On top of this technology base, cloud computing’s principal offerings can be categorized into three main groups: Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, and Software-as-a-Service. Cloud optimization is the final, critical piece of the framework—encompassing the solutions that enable cloud computing to scale and to deliver the levels of performance and reliability required for it to become part of a business’s core infrastructure.
We will now look at each of these framework components in more detail.
Virtualization >>
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