Technical words related to cloud computing

Technical words related to cloud computing

Certiology’s list of Cloud Computing Terms gives you the opportunity to identify any knowledge gaps of Cloud Computing and virtualization terms.

Cloud: The cloud itself is a group of hardware, networks, storage, services, and interfaces that facilitate the delivery of computing as a service. Cloud services includes providing services like software, infrastructure, and storage over the Internet (either as separate components or a complete platform) based on user demand.

The end user: this is the person who gets the services from the cloud. He doesn’t really have to know anything about the underlying technology. In small businesses, for example, the cloud provider becomes the de facto data center. In larger organizations, the IT organization oversees the inner workings of both internal resources and external cloud resources.

Business management: this is the authority which takes the full responsibility for overall governance of data or services living in a cloud. Cloud service providers must provide a predictable and guaranteed service level and security to all their constituents.

Utility computing: this is the computing in which hardware and software resources are concentrated in large data centers and users can pay as they consume computing, storage, and communication resources. Utility computing often requires a cloud-like infrastructure, but its focus is on the business model for providing the computing services.

Elastic computing: Cloud computing uses Internet technologies to offer elastic services. The term elastic computing refers to the ability to dynamically acquire computing resources and support a variable workload. A cloud service provider maintains a massive infrastructure to support elastic services.

Computer Grid: A computing grid is a distributed system consisting of a large number of loosely coupled, heterogeneous, and geographically dispersed systems in different administrative domains. The term computing grid is a metaphor for accessing computer power with similar ease as we access power provided by the electric grid.

Data intensive: Most applications in a cloud are data-intensive. Data intensive means that it depends and driven by data. In the case of data is not provided, applications might not work properly. Computer simulation becomes a powerful tool for scientific research in virtually all areas of science, from physics, biology, and chemistry to archeology.

P2P systems: P2P systems can be regarded as one of the precursors of today’s clouds. This new model for distributed computing promoted the idea of low-cost access to storage and central processing unit (CPU) cycles provided by participant systems; in this case, the resources are located in different administrative domains. Often the P2P systems are self-organizing and decentralized, whereas the servers in a cloud are in a single administrative domain and have a central management.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): this gives the capability to deploy consumer-created or acquired applications using programming languages and tools supported by the provider. The user does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure, including network, servers, operating systems, or storage.The user has control over the deployed applications and, possibly, over the application hosting environment configurations.

Such services include session management, device integration, sandboxes, instrumentation and testing, contents management, knowledge management, and Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI), a platform independent Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based registry providing a mechanism to register and locate Web service applications.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): this is the capability to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources; the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications.The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, deployed applications, and possibly limited control of some networking components, such as host firewalls. Services offer by this delivery model include: server hosting, Web servers, storage, computing hardware, operating systems, virtual instances, load balancing, Internet access, and bandwidth provisioning.

Cloud vulnerability: Clouds are affected by malicious attacks and failures of the infrastructure (e.g., power failures). Such events can affect Internet domain name servers and prevent access to a cloud or can directly affect the clouds. For example, an attack at Akamai on June 15, 2004 caused a domain name outage and a major blackout that affected Google, Yahoo!, and many other sites. In May 2009 Google was the target of a serious denial-of-service (DoS) attack that took down services such Google News and Gmail for several days.

Parallel Computing: the ability to work in parallel as a group represents a very efficient way to reach a common target; human beings have learned to aggregate themselves and to assemble man-made devices in organizations in which each entity may have modest ability, but a network of entities can organize themselves to accomplish goals that an individual entity cannot.

Data parallelism: this is based on partitioning the data into several blocks and running multiple copies of the same program concurrently, each running on a different data blocks.

A distributed system: this is a collection of autonomous computers that are connected through a network and distribution software called middleware, which enables computers to coordinate their activities and to share the resources of the system. A distributed system’s users perceive the system as a single integrated computing facility.

A process group: this is a collection of cooperating processes; these processes work in concert and communicate with one another to reach a common goal. For example, a parallel algorithm to solve a system of partial differential equations (PDEs) over a domain D may partition the data in several segments and assign each segment to one of the members of the process group. The processes in the group must cooperate with one another and iterate until the common boundary values computed by one process agree with the common boundary values computed by another.

A communication channel: provides the means for processes or threads to communicate with one another and coordinate their actions by exchanging messages.

A protocol: is a finite set of messages exchanged among processes to help them coordinate their actions.

Energy-proportional networks: the energy consumed by such networks is proportional to the communication load.

A service-level agreement (SLA): is a negotiated contract between two parties, the customer and the service provider. The agreement can be legally binding or informal and specifies the services that the customer receive rather than how the service provider delivers the services.

A packet-switched network: transports data units called packets through a maze of switches, where packets are queued and routed toward their destination. Packets are subject to a variable delay and loss and possibly arrive at their final destination out of order. A datagram is a basic transfer unit in a packet-switched network; it consists of a header, which contains control information necessary for its transport through the network, and a payload or data.

Internet: The Internet is a collection of separate and distinct networks, each one operating under a common framework consisting of globally unique IP addressing and using IP routing and global Border Gateway Routing (BGP) protocols. AnIP address is a string of integers uniquely identifying every host connected to the Internet; the IP address allows the network to identify first the destination network and then the host in that network to which a datagram should be delivered.

Network resource management: network resource management is a very important aspect of the management of computer clouds. A critical aspect of resource management in cloud computing is to guarantee the communication bandwidth required by an application as specified by a service-level agreement (SLA). The solutions to this problem are based on the strategies used for some time on the Internet to support the quality of service (QoS) requirements of data streaming.