My Article to FOSSUser - "Ubuntu on Cloud" Part 4

Cloud Computing Challenges

In summary, the new paradigm of cloud computing provides a number of benefits and advantages over the previous computing paradigms and many organizations are adopting it. However, there are still a number of challenges, which are currently addressed by researchers and practitioners in the field (Leavitt, 2009). They are briefly presented below.

1. Performance

The major issue in performance can be for some intensive transaction-oriented and other data-intensive applications, in which cloud computing may lack adequate performance. Also, users who are at a long distance from cloud providers may experience high latency and delays.

2. Security and Privacy

Companies are still concerned about security when using cloud computing. Customers are worried about the vulnerability to attacks, when information and 18 B. Furht critical IT resources are outside the firewall.

3. Control

Some IT departments are concerned because cloud computing providers have a full control of the platforms. Cloud computing providers typically do not design platforms for specific companies and their business practices.

4. Bandwidth Costs

With cloud computing, companies can save money on hardware and software; however they could incur higher network bandwidth charges. Bandwidth cost may be low for smaller Internet-based applications, which are not data intensive, but could significantly grow for data-intensive applications.

5. Reliability

Cloud computing still does not always offer round-the-clock reliability. There were cases where cloud computing services suffered few-hours outages. In the future, we can expect more cloud computing providers, richer services, established standards, and best practices. In the research arena, HP Labs, Intel, and Yahoo have launched the distributed Cloud Research Test Bad, with facilities in Asia, Europe, and North America, with the objective to develop innovations including cloud computing specific chips. IBM has launched the Research Computing Cloud, which is an on-demand, globally accessible set of computing resources that support business processes.

·         Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a keyword in Cloud computing which started their services back in 2002. The first set of APIs thoroughly explained in a book called “Amazon Hacks”. The following figure 3 will explain the pathway of AWS services throughout.

                                                            Figure 3

AWS has two unique characteristics. Those are the initial cost is not very huge and it scales and continues to run it in a low cost.

If your organization systems are too big, then perhaps the only best solution is “Decoupling”. Decoupling is simply, breaking your systems into small pieces and having a few dependencies on each other as possible. Initially decoupling was introduced not in web services or applications. Big organizations such as banks and organizations that used decoupling with help of tools such as CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture). The concept of CORBA was “Component based Software Engineering”. Similar set of design principle in the recent past called Service-oriented Architecture or SOA, where this is the principle mostly applied to web applications and their interactions.

 

 Continued in Part 5
           http://imthefortune7.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-article-to-fossuser-ubuntu-on-cloud_3834.html