Cloud Computing Enabling Technologies

Subhasish Ghosh Lecturer, Department of CSE

Cloud computing is an internet infrastructure where virtualized IT resources such as platforms, storage and softwares can be used as services integrated with rich internet application(RIA)s by using web services.

Enterprise computing is outsourced to data centers to reduce costs by buying fewer chassis, to reduce operational costs and to change into a simple topology. The applications including CRM, ERP, SCM, inventory manager, calendaring, dashboard and groupwares are available to use over the internet as services. This new internet infrastructure is called cloud computing. Cloud computing is an internet infrastructure where virtualized IT resources such as platforms, storage and softwares can be used as services integrated with rich internet application(RIA)s by using web services. The cloud computing can be divided into four layers infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). SaaS

PaaS

IaaS Figure 1: Cloud computing architecture Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is the basic layer of cloud computing. IaaS providers or data centers deliver computing, storage and network as pay-as-you-go services over the internet. The virtualization, server clustering and storage replication are required to deploy a successful IaaS model. The virtualization is the technology which enables sharing of processor, memory, storage, network and other resources among multiple virtual operating systems running in the same computer. Hundreds of virtual servers can be running on only ten different computers utilizing maximum resources and also scalable to increasing processing load. This server virtualization is mainly a layer referred to as hypervisor. Hypervisor directs traffic from virtual machines running on a single physical server. The hypervisor schedules each virtual machine's request to access memory or cpu. The hypervisor takes advantage of the VT (virtual technology) enabled Intel and AMD chipsets. These chipsets assist the hypervisor to emulate a complete physical hardware for each virtual machine.

Storage area network (SAN) is the popular storage architecture in the public clouds or data centers. SANs are commonly deployed in data centers to centralize data storage operations. The storage devices are typically RAIDs which are interconnected locally or remotely with high speed fiber channel SAN networks. The data centers use the hypervisor along with the SAN to allow live migration of virtual servers. The large clouds are divided into many availability zones which are also divided into units called POD. Each POD contains all the elements required to implement a data center. A POD is altogether hypervisor and SAN. The POD will be copied to group of POD and work loads will be distributed among them. Generally a customer can be connected to one POD. Customers in one POD will not experience downtime due to a crash or planned downtime in another POD. A pool of POD will be managed by cloud control system (CCS). The virtualized infrastructure connects to the cloud by using web services which publish web service description language (WSDL) defining the API to interact with it. Clouds are created and managed by softwares which run on top of hypervisor. The tasks of these cloud management softwares are recording information about available resources to virtual machines, managing deployment of new instances, managing virtual networking to new instances, providing the storage over SAN to the instances, allowing a front end to monitor the availability of resources, running instances as well as providing web services interfaces to client tools. The popular virtualization products are VMware ESX server, Citrix XenServer, RedHat enterprise virtualization hypervisor, KVM (Linux kernel virtual machine) hypervisor, Microsoft Hyper-V, Intel VT-x chipset, and AMD-V chipsets. The latest public clouds such as Savvis, Terremark and AT&T's Synaptic services use the VMware ESX hypervisor along with SAN. KVM requires the Intel VT-x chipset or AMD-V chipsets to run virtualization whereas XEN hypervisor runs both paravirtualization (does not require VT enabled processors) and hardware assisted virtualization (HVM; requires VT enabled processors). Eucalyptus is an open source software that can create and manage private or public cloud both. Eucalyptus provides Amazon's EC2 compatible platform and Amazon's S3 cloud storage platform both. Hence, clients written to use Amazon Web Service (AWS) is also compatible with Euclayptus cloud platform. Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) includes Eucalyptus along with open source software tools. UEC also includes Ubuntu server edition. UEC has made it very easy to install and configure cloud by the help of Eucalyptus. Another cloud management system is DynamicOps virtual resource manager (VRM), this has strong resource and user management features such as the administrator can dictate what kind of resources a given user or department can access without authorization and this can support workflow for resources. Platform ISF is designed for multi-workload POD environment, it can bridge heterogeneous virtualization products such as VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer and open source PODs. The platform as a service (PaaS)s are software development platforms deloyed upon the infrastructure cloud. PaaS delivers solution stack for software development and runtime environment. Bungee Connect, Aptana, Tibco, force.com, Google App Engine, AppJet, Etelos, and Qrimp provides cloud platform for software development and life cycle management. Billing is very simple such as Bungee Connect only starts to charge when applications are deployed and used. The software as a service (SaaS)s are enterprise applications such as CRM, ERP, SCM, Office automation softwares, groupware softwares, conference softwares which are deployed as services upon the infrastructure cloud. These applications are available as services in corresponding application service providers (ASP)'s web sites. As for example, the salesforce.com is delivering CRM as a

service, Cisco WebEx is delivering web conference services including screen sharing, and google is delivering email services. The customers need to register with the service, choose a payment system such as pay per minute, pay per transaction, pay per month and login to the application. The customers will be provided with a lot of personalization options. All the layers of services commonly inherent multitenancy and elasticity features. Multitenant means a single instance of software and the compute platform it runs on can serve multiple clients from different companies. Cloud service providers will provide availability and security of services to the clients. Elasticity refers to the sacalbility of services or infrastructures to meet fluctuating service demands. The cloud service providers are able to provision a new service instance in the cluster of virtualized servers during the time of increasing demand of a service. kvm 01
VM VM VM VM

Client 1 Internet router

clc01
CCS

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Hypervisor

Hardware

Figure 2: Test-drive setup of a web development cloud service provider. Finally, the recommendation can be drawn from this above discussion, to test-drive a private cloud which delivers web development cloud service which is a PaaS, is to install and configure UEC with Linux KVM hypervisor and Eucalyptus as Figure 2. The minimal setup will be a client machine with installed Firefox to use the WEB UI to manage the cloud, a server named as clc01 installed with cloud control system (CCS) Eucalyptus in this case and the client will be connected with this server by it's public network interface, another server named as kvm01 installed with KVM hypervisor and virtual machines running Apache web server and this server kvm01 will be in the same lan as the server clc01. This constructs the IaaS. The SAN interconnected with RAIDs can be connected to kvm01 machine to experiment storage virtualization. The platform will be web development software platform and web site templates are deployed in Apache web servers which are VMs which constructs the PaaS. Billing will be done after the web site will be deployed and per month basis. References 1. Cisco Systems, Cisco Cloud Computing Data Center Strategy, Architecture and Solutions, Cisco Systems Inc., 2009. 2. VMware, SAN System Design and Deployment Guide, VMware, 2008. 3. W. Simon et al., Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Architecture, Canonical, 2009. 4. D. Todd et al., Xen Hypervisor Deployment, Management and Cloud Computing Tools, Clarkson University, 2010; http://cosi.clarkson.edu/docs/installingxen/ .