The concept and connotation of cloud computing

At least 100 explanations can be found for what cloud computing is. It is now widely accepted by the Deputy director of the China Cloud Computing Experts Advisory Committee, Professor Peng, the definition: "cloud computing is through the network to provide scalable Low-cost distributed computing power." ”

Technically, the relationship between big data and cloud computing is as inseparable as the pros and cons of a coin. Large data must not be processed by a single computer, and a distributed computing architecture is required. It features a huge amount of data mining, but it must rely on the cloud computing distributed processing, distributed database, cloud storage and virtualization technology.

Cloud computing is a business computing model that distributes computing tasks across a pool of computer-enabled resources, enabling users to gain computing power, storage space, and information services on demand.

This resource pool is called the cloud. The cloud is a virtual computing resource that can be maintained and managed, usually by large server clusters, including compute servers, storage servers, and broadband resources. Cloud computing centralizes computing resources and automates management through specialized software without human involvement. Users can dynamically request some resources, support the operation of various applications, do not need to worry about cumbersome details, can focus on their own business, to improve efficiency, reduce costs and technical innovation. The core idea of cloud computing is the resource pool, which is very similar to the concept of a grid computing pool (Computing pool) that was proposed as early as 2002. Grid computing pool will compute and storage resources virtual into a set can be any combination of allocation, the size of the pool can be dynamically expanded, allocated to the user's processing capacity can be dynamically recycled reuse. This model can greatly improve the utilization of resources and improve the service quality of the platform.

Called "Cloud", it is because it has a real-world cloud in some ways: The cloud is generally large, the size of the cloud can be dynamically scaled, its boundaries are blurred, the cloud is erratic in the air, and it cannot and does not need to determine its exact location, but it does exist somewhere. It's called "cloud", and because one of the originator of cloud computing, Amazon has taken what everyone once called Grid computing, took a new name, "Elastic Computing Cloud" (Elastic Computing Cloud), and achieved commercial success.

Some people liken this model to the mode of power supply from a single generator to a centralized power plant. It means that computing power can also be used as a commodity for circulation, like gas, water and electricity, easy to use, low-cost. The biggest difference is that it is transmitted over the Internet.

Cloud computing is the development of parallel Computing (Parallel Computing), distributed Computing (distributed Computing) and Grid computing (grid Computing), or the commercial implementation of these computational scientific concepts. Cloud computing is virtualization (virtualization), Utility Computing (Utility Computing), the infrastructure as a service IaaS (infrastructure as a service), and the platform as a service PAAs (Platform as a Service) and the result of a hybrid evolution and leap in the concepts of SaaS (Software as a services).

From the perspective of research, cloud computing has the following characteristics.

(1) Super scale. "Cloud" has a considerable scale, Google Cloud computing already has more than 1 million servers, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo and other companies "cloud" has hundreds of thousands of servers. The cloud gives users unprecedented computing power.

(2) Virtualization. Cloud computing enables users to obtain services at any location, using a variety of terminals. The requested resource is from the cloud rather than the fixed physical entity. Application in the "cloud" run somewhere, but in fact the user does not need to understand the specific location of the application run, only need a notebook or a PDA, you can access the network services to obtain a variety of powerful services.

(3) High reliability. The cloud uses such measures as data replication fault tolerance and computing node isomorphism to ensure high reliability of services, and using cloud computing is more reliable than using a local computer.

(4) universality. Cloud computing is not specific to the application, in the "cloud" under the support of the structure of the ever-changing applications, the same "cloud" can support the operation of different applications.

(5) High scalability. The scale of the cloud can be scaled dynamically to meet the needs of application and user-scale growth.

(6) on-demand service. The cloud is a huge pool of resources that users buy on demand, charging like running water, electricity and gas.

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(7) is extremely inexpensive. The special fault-tolerant measures of the cloud make it possible to use extremely inexpensive nodes to form the cloud; Cloud "Automated management reduces data center management costs significantly;" The commonality and versatility of the cloud have greatly increased the utilization of resources; Cloud "facilities can be built in areas with abundant power resources, thus dramatically reducing energy costs. So the cloud has an unprecedented performance-price ratio. Therefore, users can fully enjoy the "cloud" low-cost advantage, when needed, spend hundreds of of dollars, a day to complete the previous needs of tens of thousands of dollars, a few months to complete the data processing tasks.