The use of cloud computing is a fact in modern computing, but do we really know the “cloud” that well? In this review, we’ll be discussing the good points of this architecture (and therefore understand why it is so popular) but also several disadvantages. Our study will be mainly based on two research papers.
The first one, The Case for Cloud Computing was written by Robert L. Grossman, who is a teacher at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a member of the Open Data Group, and published by the IEEE Computer Society in 2009. The main purpose of this paper is to explain what is Cloud Computing, to point out that there are two types of clouds and to bring forth the advantages of a Cloud based architecture.
The second one, Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing was written by Michael Armbrust et al and which was published at the University of California at Berkeley in 2009. Besides explaining what is a cloud and its inherent advantages, this paper emphasizes on possible limitations of the cloud architecture.
We have all heard the term “Cloud Computing” one day or another but most people have only a loose idea of what it’s really about. You could find a lot of different definitions for a cloud, as a sum up we could say that Cloud Computing refers to two specific things: the applications delivered as services over the Internet (Amazon S3, Google WebApp) and the hardware in the datacenters that provide those services. There are a lot of advantages of using a cloud : the illusion of infinite resources available whenever the user want, companies can start small and increase resources only when needed, the ability to pay for use on a short-term basis (and sometimes it’s way cheaper than a standard server farm [3] )…[1]
But the Cloud Computing is not a miracle cure and there are some drawbacks that we need to take into account. Data security and confidentiality is a very important topic nowadays, service stability is also a big issue; Cloud Computing seems to be vulnerable to several types of attacks, especially if the workload controller (MapReduce for example) is not able to bear a DOS attack [4]. Another issues are bugs in large-scale distributed systems, this is one of the biggest challenge in Cloud Computing e.g. to remove software/systems software errors in a very large scale [2]. Another obstacle is the software licensing [2], a lot of software licenses restrict the number of computers on which the software can run therefore it’s not adapted at all to the pay-as-you-go scheme commonly found in clouds [2] and software company are pretty reluctant to create specifically designed software for clouds as it interferes with the quarterly sales tracking used to measure effectiveness, which is based on one-time purchase [2]. One more obstacle is the data lock-in which comes from a lack of standardization in the world of Cloud Computing, the APIs for Cloud Computing are still essentially proprietary so the customers can’t easily extract their data or worst cannot even recover them [5].
Although cloud computing has many advantages that explain why services such Amazon S3 are so popular a lot of issues and concerns are also raised when we look further. The main problems are confidentiality and accessibility of data but also software licensing, we need to change the way we consider computing in order to overcome those problems (for example stop seeing computers mainly as hardware and start considering it like a set of services).
References:
[1] Robert L. Grossman, “The Case for Cloud Computing”, IEEE Computer Society, 2009.
[2] Michael Armburst et al, “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing”, University of California at Berkeley, 2009.
[3] J. Hamilton, “Cost of Power in Large Scale Data Centers”, 2008, available from http://perspectives.mvdirona.com .
[4] D. Hyuk Woo and H.H. Lee, “Analyzing performance vulnerability due to resource denial of service attack on chip multiprocessors”, Workshop on Chip Multiprocessor Memory Systems and Interconnects, 2007.
[5] J. Brodkin, “Loss of customer data spurs closure of online storage service ‘The Linkup’”, Network World, 2008.
No comments:
Post a Comment