Peng: Wenger (Gloud)--The Future of cloud computing

Cloud computing is a very advanced concept and technology, its scale can be dynamically expanded, processing capacity is very strong, storage space, high reliability, high utilization of resources, versatility and very low cost. Because of this, the rapid expansion of cloud computing technology to the unprecedented speed, so that traditional it enterprises have been transformed. At present, Silicon Valley has emerged hundreds of new cloud computing innovation enterprises, quite the last century in the 90 's when the internet was just the momentum of the rise.

Cloud computing is arguably the most successful business computing model yet, but it is not a panacea, and some of its flaws are what grid technology excels at:

From the perspective of platform unification, at present, there is no unified standard of cloud computing, different vendors ' solution styles and incompatible, the future will certainly be in the direction of the formation of a unified platform; Grid technology was born to solve the dynamic integration and sharing of heterogeneous resources across platforms, across systems, and across geographies, and the international grid community has formed a unified standard system and successful application. Grid technology can help to achieve interoperability between cloud computing platforms, thus achieving the integration of cloud computing facilities, so that future cloud computing will no longer be provided by vendors, but constitute a unified virtual platform. Therefore, it can be foreseen that the collaborative sharing between cloud and cloud is inseparable from grid support.

From the point of view of computing, cloud Management is a low-cost computing resource pool composed of PCs and servers, mainly for loose-coupled data processing applications, for the tight-coupled computing tasks that are not easily decomposed into numerous independent subtasks, the cloud computing model is inefficient because of frequent communication between nodes Grid technology can integrate the High-performance computers distributed in different institutions, they are good at dealing with tightly coupled applications, and many applications belong to tight coupling applications, such as numerical weather forecast, car simulation collision test, high-rise stress analysis. This kind of application is not good at cloud computing, if cloud computing and grid technology can be integrated, can give full play to their respective characteristics.

From a data perspective, cloud computing mainly manages and analyzes business data; Grid technology has integrated extremely large amounts of scientific data, such as species genetic data, astronomical observations, Earth remote sensing data, meteorological data, marine data, drug data, demographic data, etc. If you integrate cloud computing with grid technology, you can greatly expand the scope of cloud computing applications. Amazon's ongoing collection of data sets for public sharing, including human genetic data, chemical data, economic data, traffic data, and so forth, fully illustrates the need for these datasets by cloud computing, and reflects the way the collection is too primitive.

From the point of view of resource integration, to use cloud computing, it is necessary to centralize all kinds of data, systems and applications into the cloud Computing data center, and many existing information systems have the difficulty and cost of changing the operating mode and migrating to the cloud computing platform. There are also systems where data sources may be far away from the data center, and data sources are constantly being updated (the Internet has this feature), and if the requirement is to be transmitted to the cloud Computing Center at any time, the consumption of network bandwidth is not economical. So there will be a large number of application systems in a decentralized state, and will not focus on the cloud computing platform, and the grid technology can be integrated into the existing resources, to achieve "physical dispersion, logical concentration" effect, you can skillfully solve this problem.

From the point of view of information security, many users worry about hosting their valuable data into the cloud computing center. is equivalent to the loss of absolute control over the data, the possibility of being seen by a third party, being illegally exploited or lost, and thus not daring to adopt cloud computing technology; In a grid environment, data can still be stored in the original data center, is still under the control of its owner, but providing data access services to the outside world is a "can, but not take away" model without losing ownership of the data, but the use of data resources has been expanded and utilization increased. Because data sources are controlled by different owners, they can determine whether each type of data is shared and in what range, rather than sharing all the data in the cloud computing datacenter to help avoid the spread of sensitive data.

Therefore, cloud computing and grid technology are complementary relationships, not superseded relationships. Grid technology mainly solves the problem of sharing various information resources distributed in different organizations, while cloud computing mainly solves the problem of centralized sharing of computing power and storage space. Predictably, cloud computing and grid technology will eventually integrate, this is the cloud computing tomorrow, the author gave it a name, called Wenger (Gloud): Gloud=grid+cloud.

The benchmark for combining cloud computing with grid technology will be a service-oriented architecture SOA (Services Oriented architecture). SOA was first launched by Gartner in 1996. The essence of the SOA architecture model is business modeling--encapsulating all information resources into services to address interoperability issues among businesses in a service format. Currently, both grid technology and cloud computing are basically compliant with the Web Services specification. WEB Services is one of the implementation mechanisms of SOA. WEB Services is a software application identified by a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier). The interface and bindings of the application can be defined, described, and discovered in an xml-based language. At the same time, the application can interact directly with other software applications through an internet-based XML message protocol. Web services are popular because they are simple, standard, cross-platform, vendor-independent, significantly reducing architectural coupling and providing service-level integration.

In the SOA framework, both grid services, cloud computing services, or other Web services can easily coexist, share, and interoperate. In such an environment, it is hard to know which parts are traditional web Services, which are cloud computing, and which are grid technologies, and there is absolutely no need for users to be aware of them. Users care about what services they need, such as data processing services, High-performance Computing services, Enterprise Management Services, E-commerce services, and so on. As shown in the following figure.

Figure cloud Computing and grid Services Fusion Vision

It should be said that the era of cloud is quite beautiful!

Author: Peng, Source: China Cloud Computing (http://www.chinacloud.cn)

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