Cloud computing: Several clouds float over the Internet"

"Only KB of memory is enough ." Bill Gates predicted the future of computer science in 1981. It can be seen that even computer genius is hard to think of people's demand for computing power growing so fast. Today, Tb-level information storage has quietly moved into personal computing. On the one hand, the chip industry continues Moore's Law to provide people with computing power through PCs and large hosts, at the same time, people are also thinking about new ways to get computing power. With the rapid development of the Internet and the success of companies such as Google and Amazon, people are turning to the Internet. Therefore, the concept of "Cloud" Computing Based on networks is generated.

 

What is cloud computing?

Let's give an example of life first. In the past, people needed to buy their own gas tanks for fire generation. Today, the gas has basically become a centralized supply, and users can access it easily as long as pipelines are connected. Back to the enterprise's demand for computing power, individuals or enterprises usually need to buy more PCs or servers to increase computing power, which is equivalent to buying gas tanks. So can users use the "Pipeline" to obtain the computing capability as needed? This is exactly the goal of "Cloud" computing, allowing users to lease computing power over the high-speed internet without having to invest heavily in hardware. All of this is achieved through the "cloud" computing core, which is a data center composed of thousands of industrial standard servers. These servers form a server cluster through an intricate distributed mesh to provide centralized management and computing capabilities, while distributed computing processes are hidden, you don't need to know which server or which server is providing services for you. All you need is to access this "Cloud ". In fact, we are already feeling the Internet "Cloud ". Google's search engine can be regarded as a typical cloud computing instance. A user submits a query and computing request in the search box and sends it to a large server cluster of Google over the Internet. Google then returns the search result to the user.
However, the computing capability of the "Cloud" is enhanced with the continuous expansion of the distributed network server cluster.

 

At present, cloud computing is still in its infancy. Many companies provide a wide range of cloud computing services, from technical suppliers to software service providers. In general, "Cloud" computing can be divided into the following types:

1. Cloud Computing Basic technology provider
This type of cloud computing provides underlying technical platforms and core cloud services. Amazon.com, Google, sun, and IBM all belong to this category. This cloud computing service will support the entire Internet virtual data center so that it can combine memory, I/O devices, storage and computing capabilities into a virtual resource pool to provide the entire network service.

2.
Cloud computing platform service provider
This form of cloud computing provides the development environment as a service. You can create your own applications to run on the vendor's infrastructure and upload them to the user through the network. Typical examples include the force.com development platform of salesforce.com and the development platform of Facebook.

3.
Cloud computing API provider
Network services are closely related to software-as-a-service (SAAS). network service providers provide APIs to help developers expand functionality through the network, rather than simply providing mature application software. Their services range from providing scattered commercial services to Google
Maps and other full set of API services.

4. Cloud computing interactive platform provider
This type of cloud computing provides a platform for interaction between users and providers. For example, rightscale uses Amazon
EC2 network computing service and S3 network storage service APIs (Application Programming Interface Application Programming)
Interface) provides an operation panel and AWS (Amazon's Web Services) Front-end hosting service.

5. Cloud computing SaaS
This type of cloud computing transmits programs to thousands of users through a browser. In the eyes of users, this will save the cost of server and software authorization; from the supplier's point of view, it is enough to maintain only one program, which can reduce costs. For example
Google search, online office services such as Google Apps and zoho's zoho office.

 

It giants gather cloud computing

Cloud computing is regarded as a "revolutionary computing model". It is a key move from the desktop to the Internet. who has won the battlefield at the crucial moment of switching between old and new rules, who wins the right to create rules. Therefore, there are many Internet giants in this cloud computing competition, and they also have their own technical characteristics. Google and
Amazon.com

 

Google: GFS, mapreduce, and bigtable

Google is an important role in this competition. Google's goal is to integrate global information, so it encounters data that can only be stored in a distributed manner earlier than normal websites. Therefore, Google developed a unique GFS
(Google File
System), mapreduce and bigtable technology.GSFIs Google's core platform, compared with other file systems,

1gsf is more powerful in cross-data center performance, with the scalability of 2 thousands of network nodes and 3 meeting the needs for reading and writing bandwidth of 1 Gigabit bytes of data, 4. efficient cross-node operation distribution to reduce bottlenecks. 5. Component errors are not treated as exceptions but are handled as common situations, 6. Most files are updated by adding new data, rather than changing existing data and other features. therefore, Google
The massive data stored in file system requires an astonishing amount of computing for analysis. This gave birthMapreduce
The distributed development platform abstracts common operations on massive datasets into map and reduce sets, which greatly simplifies the difficulty of programmers writing distributed computing programs.BigtableIs a distributed Hash mechanism built on GFS by Google to store structured data. it is not a relational database, so it does not support SQL queries and other operations, but it contains thousands of gigabytes of memory, supporting processing millions of reads and writes per second. and these formal "Cloud" infrastructure. Today, Google shares some of its cloud computing knowledge in an open-source manner and starts the "codenamed Google
101 "project, which means that more users can participate in programming and development based on Google's" cloud "system, which is regarded as a favorable means to promote cloud computing.

 

Amazon.com: S3, EC2, and simpledb

Amazon.com is one of the first providers to join the "Cloud" computing service. Its typical "Cloud" computing applications mainly include Amazon simple storage
Service, EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud) and simpledb.S3It provides online storage space and relies on its unique distributed storage technology to solve the online storage problem of massive data volumes (especially unstructured data). At the same time, S3
Open Web Services provides developers with development interfaces and allows third-party tools such as S3 backup, duplictiy, and S3
Solutions and so on are developed on Amazon S3.EC2On the basis of S3, it further helps users provide online computing capabilities.
EC2 is a network computing service based on the xen Virtual Machine Management Program structure. It allows developers to create Linux-based virtual machines. The creation process can start from scratch or use pre-built image files. Then, using the Web Service API or the script package of this API, you can quickly deploy it to any number of virtual machines and run almost any program.Simpledb(Simple database) is a solution for structured data query. Currently, it can provide some core functions of the database. For users, you no longer need to perform complex database maintenance.
It is only for simple web application database operations such as adding, deleting, modifying, and querying, but it is already a challenge for traditional RDBMS (Relational Database Service) functions.

 

Today, not only are Internet vendors concerned with "Cloud" computing, but many old it giants have joined the war and launched their own cloud computing services. For example,Sun launches the Black Box programBased on cloud computing theory, the plan aims to move the data center from a crowded and sultry data center to an outdoor environment, to a mobile container. enterprises can move it to various places, reduce the cost of data centers. The blue giant IBM was also highly involved and launchedIBM "Blue
Cloud Blue cloud plan. The goal of this plan is a computer and software product combination that makes enterprise data centers and internet operations closer.
Create a data center for an enterprise's own cloud computing model. This feature allows IBM to bypass the security issue of data migration from local to Internet by selling cloud computing solutions and terminals to customers. Microsoft also adopts the online service strategy"Windows
Live"Online storage is a key step for Microsoft to connect hundreds of millions of Windows users and provide them with cloud computing." When you think of storage, you will think of Windows
Live ."

Cloud computing is so popular among many vendors, the reason is that
1.
Cost-effective: cloud computing uses a distributed system with a better cost-performance ratio than a centralized system. You can even use the cheapest PC to form a cloud, and the computing performance can indeed exceed that of large hosts.
2. distributed applications:
For example, most enterprise applications are distributed.
3. reliability: the distributed system is highly fault tolerant and relies on Server clusters to ensure that computing tasks can be easily migrated to other servers in the cloud even if a single point of Server failure occurs, ensure normal operation of computing.
4.
Scalability: You can add new servers to existing Server clusters in real time to increase cloud computing capabilities.
5.
Flexibility: It is compatible with products of different hardware manufacturers and is compatible with low-configuration machines and peripherals for high-performance computing.

 

Cloud computing is not yet mature

Although the benefits of using cloud computing services sound so attractive, more people are holding a wait-and-see attitude. This kind of prudence comes first from the consideration of security issues. Cloud computing means that enterprises may store high-commercial data such as customer information in the hands of cloud computing service providers. Is data secure? In an age where information is king, even the leakage of data fragments is dangerous. Second, the technologies and standards of various cloud computing service providers are not uniform yet. It has caused a lot of confusion about which platform the user chooses. In addition, enterprises have even established local data centers for their existing local data and services and how to migrate them to the cloud computing platform at a lower cost. Whether enterprises are used to sharing their own resources with enterprises that are also connected to cloud computing, and whether they are used to the new business model of "Cloud" computing and service-based payment "still have many questions for users. These are always the secrets of cloud computing promotion and development.

 

The future of cloud computing

Although cloud computing technology is still in its infancy, there is no doubt that cloud computing has a bright future. In the future, we only need a laptop or a mobile phone to implement everything we need through network services, even such tasks as super computing. So far, many people have focused on cloud computing.
"Software as a service", but "software as a service" is only the tip of the iceberg. The future trend is from your work and life to entertainment to different communities, no matter where you are, no matter what you are exposed to, all transactions can be reflected in the form of a "service. Cloud computing is the end of the device-centric computing era. It is replaced by an Internet-centric computing mode. There is no doubt that devices will continue to play an important role, but in the next development phase, various device-based interactive cloud services are the real focus.

 

Use your computer as an access point and hand over everything else to an internet cafe. Now Google
CEO Schmidt predicted that 90% of computing tasks could be completed through cloud computing technology in the future computing model. This person, who has worked in Sun, Novell, and Google, has been hailed as a man who has struggled with Microsoft for a lifetime. Can he really lead Google to put people down their PCs, we are not sure about turning the Internet into a new method for obtaining computing resources. But at least those it giants pushing cloud computing do have a good start.