My Article to FOSSUser - "Ubuntu on Cloud" Part 1

“Any company has a busy season is a candidate of Cloud Computing”

What is Cloud Computing?

“The future of internal IT is very much a private cloud”

Cloud computing, the top-talk of almost all IT professionals nowadays, but actually what does it means?? The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines cloud computing as,
it is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g. networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

But, in simple terms we can refer as, if you can walk into any library or Internet cafe and sit down at any computer without preference for operating system or browser and access a service, that service is cloud-based.

The Cloud computing is a paradigm shift from various computing models such as Main frame, PC, Network, Internet, Grid and finally the industry shifted into Cloud which has many more advantages over other five models.

Grid is a computing architecture where computations can be split and data can be processed in parallel across a distributed network of computers.
What actually Grid is, a unit which uses many different processing powers to process and perform a task. But this task is managed by a primary machine. What this primary machine does is, it divides the task into small chunk of tasks and these small tasks will be distributed to the other machines in the same cluster. The processed output of each machine will be sent to the primary machine to get the ultimate result. The primary machine will take care of organizing the results and managing them. All the results are clubbed together and a single output is provided.

So, Grid computing == Cloud computing??

                                                 Figure 1                                              

No. Not true at all. There are various differing factors in two models. What we can identify as main differentiating factor between the two is, the method it adopts for computing the tasks within their individual environments. Grids as I said it divides the tasks into machines in the cluster and after each machine processed the data, which data will be sending to the primary machine. See figure 1.
The cloud architecture enables the user to use different set of services, but the user can use the service without investigating the underneath architectures. The beauty of Cloud is that!! Though, grid too offers similar facility for computing power, but cloud computing isn’t restricted to just that. With a cloud users can avail various services such as website hosting etc.

Continued in Part 2
http://imthefortune7.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-article-to-fossuser-ubuntu-on-cloud_05.html