Five levels emerging to explain the unique connotation of cloud computing

Today, cloud computing is more than just a concept, but it has entered a large-scale commercial phase. For example, March 19, 2008 10 o'clock in the morning, the National Archives released the White House calendar of Hillary Clinton's first lady in 1993-2001. Because of the high news value of these files, the Washington Post hopes to be able to upload these files to the Internet for public enquiries at the very first time. However, these files are not searchable low-quality PDF files and need to be converted. It takes more than 1 years to complete the format conversion of all files if the current computing resources of the newspaper are to be used. So the newspaper handed it to Amazon's cloud computing platform, Amazon EC2, and used 200 virtual servers to convert all documents within 9 hours, costing only a few 144.62 dollars.

More and more manufacturers are engaged in the cloud computing tide, thus deriving the cloud storage, cloud security and other dazzling new concepts, which also makes the public on cloud computing's specific connotation is increasingly blurred.

In fact, from the architecture of service delivery, cloud computing can be divided into 4 levels:

The bottom tier, called the infrastructure services layer, is a collection of virtualized hardware resources and related management functions. Vendors abstract these resources through virtualization technology to provide dynamic, flexible infrastructure layer Services (IaaS) externally.

The second tier, the platform service layer, also known as "cloud Middleware", is a collection of generic and reusable software resources that provide the environment for development, operation, management, and monitoring of cloud computing.

The third tier is the application software layer, which provides the required application software for cloud computing.

The fourth tier is the business services layer, where software or services (SaaS) operators provide the user with a lease of software or applications, depending on the user's needs. This delivery model is a huge change in both business and technology: for users, they no longer need to care about the installation and upgrade of the software, nor do they need to buy a software license at once, but pay for it on demand based on the actual conditions of the leased service. Google's Gmail and Google Docs, for example, are typical SaaS models.

Now, the fifth level of cloud computing is beginning to emerge, and we call it arranges Services, which is closely related to the application of Web2.0. When cloud computing and Web2.0 are combined, the boundaries between users and producers become blurred, creating value together through community-type collaboration.

Last year, IBM United Wuxi (national) software Park to build a "Pangu World software Service innovation incubator platform", began arranges services pilot. Li, chief technical officer of IBM Greater China and Dean of China Research Institute, introduced the platform with open Operation management mode, which enables different software vendors to connect with each other to meet the needs of users. In the future, if the platform continues to expand and more cloud computing services are established, these platforms will be able to interconnect and form a cloud computing network.

For example, Wuxi de Li is an independent software developer (ISV), after entering the Wuxi (national) software Park, directly leased the cloud computing platform in 1.5 months to successfully complete the development of the baking management system. Since then, they have not directly sold software products, but use the cloud computing platform to provide customers with SaaS services, and achieved good results. In this example, Wuxi de Li is both a user of the cloud computing platform and a producer. With the new service model of arranges services, cloud computing is bound to grow even more.