Cloud Computing

UNIT II

Introduction to Cloud Computing

Evolution of Cloud Computing

Cloud Characteristics- Elasticity in Cloud
On-demand Provisioning

NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture

Architectural Design Challenges
Deployment Models: Public, Private and Hybrid Clouds
Service Models: IaaS- PaaS – SaaS
Benefits of Cloud Computing.

Defining Cloud Computing

⮚ Cloud computing takes the technology, services, and applications that are
similar to those on the Internet and turns them into a self-service utility.
⮚ The use of the word “cloud” makes reference to the two essential concepts:

1. Abstraction: Cloud computing abstracts the details of system

implementation from users and developers. Applications run on
physical systems that aren’t specified, data is stored in locations that
are unknown, administration of systems is outsourced to others, and
access by users is ubiquitous.
2. Virtualization: Cloud computing virtualizes systems by pooling and
sharing resources. Systems and storage can be provisioned as needed
from a centralized infrastructure, costs are assessed on a metered
basis, multi-tenancy is enabled, and resources are scalable with
agility.

A set of new technologies has come along that, along with the need for more efficient
and affordable computing, has enabled an on-demand system to develop.

Clouds can come in many different types, and the services and applications that run
on clouds may or may not be delivered by a cloud service provider. These different
types and levels of cloud services mean that it is important to define what type of
cloud computing system you are working with.

Internet Vs Cloud computing:

The Internet offers abstraction, runs using the same set of protocols and standards,
and uses the same applications and operating systems. These same characteristics
are found in an intranet, an internal version of the Internet.

Cloud computing is an abstraction based on the notion of pooling physical resources

and presenting them as a virtual resource. It is a new model for provisioning
resources, for staging applications, and for platform-independent user access to
services.

Examples:

The cloud computing has changed the nature of commercial system deployment,
consider these three examples:

Google: In the last decade, Google has built a worldwide network of datacenters to
serviceits search engine. In doing so Google has captured a substantial portion of the
world’s advertising revenue. That revenue has enabled Google to offer free software
to users based on that infrastructure and has changed the market for user-facing
software. This is the classic Software as a Service case.

Azure Platform: By contrast, Microsoft is creating the Azure Platform. It enables

.NETFramework applications to run over the Internet as an alternate platform for
Microsoft developer software running on desktops.

Amazon Web Services: One of the most successful cloud-based businesses is

AmazonWeb Services, which is an Infrastructure as a Service offering that lets
you rent virtual computers on Amazon’s own infrastructure.

These new capabilities enable applications to be written and deployed with minimal
expense and to be rapidly scaled and made available worldwide as business
conditions permit.
Evolution of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is all about renting computing services. This idea first came in the
1950s. In making cloud computing what it is today, five technologies played a vital
role. These are distributed systems and its peripherals, virtualization, web 2.0, service
orientation, and utility computing.

● Distributed Systems:

It is a composition of multiple independent systems but all of them are depicted as a

single entity to the users. The purpose of distributed systems is to share resources and
also use them effectively and efficiently. Distributed systems possess characteristics
such as scalability, concurrency, continuous availability, heterogeneity, and
independence in failures. But the main problem with this system was that all the
systems were required to be present at the same geographical location. Thus to solve
this problem, distributed computing led to three more types of computing and they
were-Mainframe computing, cluster computing, and grid computing.
● Mainframe computing:

Mainframes which first came into existence in 1951 are highly powerful and reliable
computing machines. These are responsible for handling large data such as massive
input-output operations. Even today these are used for bulk processing tasks such as
online transactions etc. These systems have almost no downtime with high fault
tolerance. After distributed computing, these increased the processing capabilities of
the system. But these were very expensive. To reduce this cost, cluster computing
came as an alternative to mainframe technology.

● Cluster computing:

In 1980s, cluster computing came as an alternative to mainframe computing. Each

machine in the cluster was connected to each other by a network with high
bandwidth. These were way cheaper than those mainframe systems. These were
equally capable of high computations. Also, new nodes could easily be added to the
cluster if it was required. Thus, the problem of the cost was solved to some extent but
the problem related to geographical restrictions still pertained. To solve this, the
concept of grid computing was introduced.

● Grid computing:

In 1990s, the concept of grid computing was introduced. It means that different
systems were placed at entirely different geographical locations and these all were
connected via the internet. These systems belonged to different organizations and
thus the grid consisted of heterogeneous nodes. Although it solved some problems
but new problems emerged as the distance between the nodes increased. The main
problem which was encountered was the low availability of high bandwidth
connectivity and with it other network associated issues. Thus. cloud computing is
often referred to as “Successor of grid computing”.

● Virtualization:
It was introduced nearly 40 years back. It refers to the process of creating a virtual
layer over the hardware which allows the user to run multiple instances
simultaneously on the hardware. It is a key technology used in cloud computing. It is
the base on which major cloud computing services such as Amazon EC2, VMware
vCloud, etc work on. Hardware virtualization is still one of the most common types
of virtualization.

● Web 2.0:

It is the interface through which the cloud computing services interact with the
clients. It is because of Web 2.0 that we have interactive and dynamic web pages. It
also increases flexibility among web pages. Popular examples of web 2.0 include
Google Maps, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Needless to say, social media is possible
because of this technology only. In gained major popularity in 2004.

● Service orientation:

It acts as a reference model for cloud computing. It supports low-cost, flexible, and
evolvable applications. Two important concepts were introduced in this computing
model. These were Quality of Service (QoS) which also includes the SLA (Service
Level Agreement) and Software as a Service (SaaS).

● Utility computing:

It is a computing model that defines service provisioning techniques for services such
as compute services along with other major services such as storage, infrastructure,
etc which are provisioned on a pay-per-use basis.

Examining the Characteristics of Cloud

Computing

It’s an evolutionary change that enables a revolutionary new approach to how

computing services are produced and consumed.

Paradigm shift
When you choose a cloud service provider, you are renting or leasing part of an
enormous infra-structure of datacenters, computers, storage, and networking
capacity.
Many of these datacenters are multi-million-dollar investments by the companies
that run them.

For example, there are some 20 datacenters in Amazon Web Service’s cloud and
Google’s cloud includes perhaps some 35 datacenters worldwide.

[Link]’s infrastructure was built to support elastic demand so the system could
accommodate peak traffic on a busy shopping day such as “Black Monday”, which is
the Monday after Thanksgiving in the United States when Internet Christmas sales
traditionally start. Because much of the capacity was idle, [Link] first opened
its network to partners and then as Amazon Web Services to customers.

As these various datacenters grew in size, businesses have developed their

datacenters as “green-field” projects. Datacenters have been sited to do the
following:

o Have access to low cost power

o Leverage renewable power source
o Be near abundant water
o Be sited where high-speed network backbone connections can be made
o Keep land costs modest and occupation unobtrusive
o Obtain tax breaks
o Optimize the overall system latency

These characteristics make cloud computing networks highly efficient and capture
enough margin to make utility computing profitable.

According to the research firm IDC, the following areas were the top five cloud
applications in use in 2010:

● Collaboration applications
● Web applications/Web serving
● Cloud backup
● Business applications
● Personal productivity applications
The last five years have seen a proliferation of services and productivity applications
delivered on-line as cloud computing applications.

For example, many people have used [Link] for their auction listings
and sales management. That site recently expanded its service to include a CRM
connector to [Link]. One of the largest call center operations companies is a
cloud-based service, [Link].

The cost advantages of cloud computing have enabled new software vendors to
create productivity applications that they can make available to people at a much
smaller cost.

On-Demand Provisioning

On-demand computing is an enterprise-level model of technology by which a

customer can purchase cloud services as and when needed.

For example, if a customer needs to utilize additional servers for the duration of a
project, they can do so and then drop back to the previous level after the project is
completed.

ODC make computing resources such as storage capacity, computational speed and
software applications available to users as needed for specific temporary projects,
known or unexpected workloads, routine work, or long-term technological and
computing requirements.

The NIST model

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has a set of
working definitions that separate cloud computing into service models and
deployment models. Those models and their relationship to essential characteristics
of cloud computing are shown in Figure 1.1.
The NIST model originally did not require a cloud to use virtualization to pool
resources, nor did it absolutely require that a cloud support multi-tenancy in the
earliest definitions of cloud computing. Multi-tenancy is the sharing of resources
among two or more clients. The latest version of the NIST definition does require
that cloud computing networks use virtualization and support multi-tenancy.

FIGURE 1.1
The NIST cloud model doesn’t address a number of intermediary services such as
transaction or service brokers, provisioning, integration, and interoperability
services that form the basis for many cloud computing discussions.

The Cloud Cube Model

The Open Group maintains an association called the Jericho Forum whose main
focus is how to protect cloud networks. The group has an interesting model that
attempts to categorize a cloud network based on four dimensional factors.

The type of cloud networks you use dramatically changes the notion of where the
boundary between the client’s network and the cloud begins and ends.

The four dimensions of the Cloud Cube Model are shown in Figure 1.2 and listed
here:

Physical location of the data:

Internal (I) / External (E) determines your organization’sboundaries.

Ownership:
Proprietary (P) / Open (O) is a measure of not only the technology ownership,but of
interoperability, ease of data transfer, and degree of vendor application lock-in.

Security boundary:
Perimeterised (Per) / De-perimiterised (D-p) is a measure of whetherthe operation is
inside or outside the security boundary or network firewall.

Sourcing: Insourced or Outsourced means whether the service is provided by the

customer or the service provider.

Taken together, the fourth dimension corresponds to two different states in the eight
possible cloud forms: Per (IP, IO, EP, EO) and D-p (IP, IO, EP, EO). The sourcing
dimension addresses the deliverer of the service. What the Cloud Cube Model is
meant to show is that the traditional notion of a network boundary being the
network’s firewall no longer applies in cloud computing.
Architectural Design Challenges
Cloud computing is used for enabling global access to mutual pools of resources such
as services, apps, data, servers, and computer networks. It is done on either a
third-party server located in a data center or a privately owned cloud. This makes
data-accessing contrivances more reliable and efficient, with nominal administration
effort.
Because cloud technology depends on the allocation of resources to attain
consistency and economy of scale, similar to a utility, it is also fairly cost-effective,
making it the choice for many small businesses and firms.
But there are also many challenges involved in cloud computing, and if you’re not
prepared to deal with them, you won’t realize the benefits. Here are six common
challenges you must consider before implementing cloud computing technology.

1. Cost
Cloud computing itself is affordable, but tuning the platform according to the
company’s needs can be expensive. Furthermore, the expense of transferring the data
to public clouds can prove to be a problem for short-lived and small-scale projects.
Companies can save some money on system maintenance, management, and
acquisitions. But they also have to invest in additional bandwidth, and the absence of
routine control in an infinitely scalable computing platform can increase costs.

2. Service Provider Reliability

The capacity and capability of a technical service provider are as important as price.
The service provider must be available when you need them. The main concern
should be the service provider’s sustainability and reputation. Make sure you
comprehend the techniques via which a provider observes its services and defends
dependability claims.

3. Downtime
Downtime is a significant shortcoming of cloud technology. No seller can promise a
platform that is free of possible downtime. Cloud technology makes small companies
reliant on their connectivity, so companies with an untrustworthy internet connection
probably want to think twice before adopting cloud computing.
4. Password Security
Industrious password supervision plays a vital role in cloud security. However, the
more people you have accessing your cloud account, the less secure it is. Anybody
aware of your passwords will be able to access the information you store there.
Businesses should employ multi-factor authentication and make sure that passwords
are protected and altered regularly, particularly when staff members leave. Access
rights related to passwords and usernames should only be allocated to those who
require them.

5. Data privacy
Sensitive and personal information that is kept in the cloud should be defined as
being for internal use only, not to be shared with third parties. Businesses must have a
plan to securely and efficiently manage the data they gather.

6. Vendor lock-in
Entering a cloud computing agreement is easier than leaving it. “Vendor lock-in”
happens when altering providers is either excessively expensive or just not possible.
It could be that the service is nonstandard or that there is no viable vendor substitute.
It comes down to buyer carefulness. Guarantee the services you involve are typical
and transportable to other providers, and above all, understand the requirements.
Cloud computing is a good solution for many businesses, but it’s important to know
what you’re getting into. Having plans to address these six prominent challenges first
will help ensure a successful experience.

Cloud Types
There are two distinct sets of models:
Deployment models: This refers to the location and management of the
cloud’sinfrastructure.
Service models: This consists of the particular types of services that you can access
on acloud computing platform.

Deployment models
A deployment model defines the purpose of the cloud and the nature of how the cloud
is located.

The NIST definition for the four deployment models is as follows:

Public cloud:
The public cloud infrastructure is available for public use alternatively for alarge
industry group and is owned by an organization selling cloud services.

Private cloud: The private cloud infrastructure is operated for the exclusive use
of anorganization. The cloud may be managed by that organization or a third
party. Private clouds may be either on- or off-premises.

Hybrid cloud: A hybrid cloud combines multiple clouds (private, community of

public) where those clouds retain their unique identities, but are bound together as a
unit. Ahybrid cloud may offer standardized or proprietary access to data and
applications, as well as application portability.

Community cloud: A community cloud is one where the cloud has been
organized toserve a common function or purpose.
It may be for one organization or for several organizations, but they share common
concerns such as their mission, policies, security, regulatory compliance needs, and
so on. A community cloud may be managed by the constituent organization(s) or by
a third party.
Figure 1.3 shows the different locations that clouds can come in.

The United States Government, under the auspices of the General Services
Administrator (GSA), launched a cloud computing portal called [Link], as shown
in Figure 1.4, with the purpose of providing cloud services to federal agencies.
Described under the “U.S. Federal Cloud Computing Initiative
([Link]
GSA), the goal of the initiative is to make large portions of the federal government’s
apparatus available under a cloud computing model. This is a good example of a
community cloud deployment, with the government being the community.
FIGURE 1.4
[Link] is the U.S. government’s cloud computing system for its various agencies.

[Link] is also making available connections to free media services from its
cloud, such as Twitter and YouTube. An example of this connection in practice is
the YouTube channel created by the White House for citizens’ outreach. You can
find the White House channel at http:// [Link]/whitehouse and the
general U.S. Government YouTube channel at
[Link] You can see YouTube in action when you
visit [Link] and click the video link that usually appears on that home
page.
Service models
o In the deployment model, different cloud types are an expression of the
manner in which infrastructure is deployed.
o You can think of the cloud as the boundary between where a client’s
network, management, and responsibilities ends and the cloud service provider’s
begins.
o As cloudcomputing has developed, different vendors offer clouds that have
different services associated with them.
o The portfolio of services offered adds another set of definitions called the
service model.

o There are many different service models, all of which take the following
form:

XaaS, or “<Something> as a Service”

Three service types have been universally accepted:

Infrastructure as a Service:
IaaS provides virtual machines, virtual storage, virtual infra-structure, and other
hardware assets as resources that clients can provision.

Platform as a Service:
PaaS provides virtual machines, operating systems, applications, services,
development frameworks, transactions, and control structures.

Software as a Service:
SaaS is a complete operating environment with applications, management, and the
user interface.

Benefits of cloud computing

“The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing” by Peter Mell and Tim Grance (version
14, 10/7/2009) classified cloud computing into the three SPI service models (SaaS,
IaaS, and PaaS) and four cloud types (public, private, community, and hybrid), also
assigns five essential characteristics that cloud computing systems must offer:

On-demand self-service:
A client can provision computer resources without the need forinteraction with cloud
service provider personnel.

Broad network access:

Access to resources in the cloud is available over the networkusing standard methods
in a manner that provides platform-independent access to clients of all types.
This includes a mixture of heterogeneous operating systems, and thick and thin
platforms such as laptops, mobile phones, and PDA.

Resource pooling:
A cloud service provider creates resources that are pooled together in asystem that
supports multi-tenant usage.
Physical and virtual systems are dynamically allocated or reallocated as needed.
Intrinsic in this concept of pooling is the idea of abstraction that hides the location
of resources such as virtual machines, processing, memory, storage, and network
bandwidth and connectivity.

Rapid elasticity:
Resources can be rapidly and elastically provisioned.
The system can add resources by either scaling up systems (more powerful
computers) or scaling out systems (more computers of the same kind), and scaling
may be automatic or manual. From the standpoint of the client, cloud computing
resources should look limit-less and can be purchased at any time and in any
quantity.

Measured service:
The use of cloud system resources is measured, audited, and reportedto the customer
based on a metered system.
A client can be charged based on a known metric such as amount of storage used,
number of transactions, network I/O (Input/Output) or bandwidth, amount of
processing power used, and so forth. A client is charged based on the level of
services provided.
Additional advantages:

Lower costs:
Because cloud networks operate at higher efficiencies and with greater utilization,
significant cost reductions are often encountered.
Ease of utilization:
Depending upon the type of service being offered, you may find thatyou do not
require hardware or software licenses to implement your service.
Quality of Service:
The Quality of Service (QoS) is something that you can obtain undercontract from
your vendor.
Reliability:
The scale of cloud computing networks and their ability to provide load balancing
and failover makes them highly reliable, often much more reliable than what you
can achieve in a single organization.
Outsourced IT management:
A cloud computing deployment lets someone else manageyour computing
infrastructure while you manage your business. In most instances, you achieve
considerable reductions in IT staffing costs.

Simplified maintenance and upgrade:

Because the system is centralized, you can easilyapply patches and upgrades. This
means your users always have access to the latest software versions.
Low Barrier to Entry:
In particular, upfront capital expenditures are dramaticallyreduced. In cloud
computing, anyone can be a giant at any time.

Cloud computing is not a panacea, however. In many instances, cloud computing

doesn’t work well for particular applications.

Disadvantages of cloud computing

When you use an application or service in the cloud, you are using something that
isn’t necessarily as customizable as you might want.

All cloud computing applications suffer from the inherent latency that is intrinsic in
their WAN connectivity.
While cloud computing applications excel at large-scale processing tasks, if your
application needs large amounts of data transfer, cloud computing may not be the
best model for you.

Additionally, cloud computing is a stateless system, as is the Internet in general. In

order for communication to survive on a distributed system, it is necessarily
unidirectional in nature.

All the requests you use in HTTP: PUTs, GETs, and so on are requests to a service
provider. The service provider then sends a response. Although it may seem that you
are carrying on a conversation between client and provider, there is an architectural
disconnect between the two. That lack of state allows messages to travel over
different routes and for data to arrive out of sequence, and many other characteristics
allow the communication to succeed even when the medium is faulty. Therefore, to
impose transactional coherency upon the system, additional overhead in the form of
service brokers, transaction managers, and other middleware must be added to the
system. This can introduce a very large performance hit into some applications.

If you had to pick a single area of concern in cloud computing, that area would
undoubtedly be privacy and security. When your data travels over and rests on
systems that are no longer under your control, you have increased risk due to the
interception and malfeasance of others.

Lab Exercise 1 : Use Google collaboration tools

Creating new files

Google Drive gives you access to a suite of tools that allows you to create and edit a
variety of files, including documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. There are
five types of files you can create on Google Drive:

● Documents: For composing letters, flyers, essays, and other

text-based files (similar to Microsoft Word documents)
 ● Spreadsheets: For storing and organizing information (similar to
Microsoft Excel workbooks)

● Presentations: For creating slideshows (similar to Microsoft

PowerPoint presentations)

● Forms: For collecting and organizing data

● Drawings: For creating simple vector graphics or diagrams

The process for creating new files is the same for all file types. Watch the video
below to learn more.

To create a new file:

1. From Google Drive, locate and select the New button, then choose the
type of file you want to create. In our example, we'll select Google
Docs to create a new document.
2. Your new file will appear in a new tab on your browser. Locate and
select Untitled document in the upper-left corner.
 3. The Rename dialog box will appear. Type a name for your file, then
click OK.

4. Your file will be renamed. You can access the file at any time from your
Google Drive, where it will be saved automatically. Simply double-click
to open the file again.

You may notice that there is no Save button for your files. This is because Google
Drive uses autosave, which automatically and immediately saves your files as you
edit them.
How to run a Python script in the cloud?

1. Launch your cloud computer

Below is a quick step-by-step guide to starting a cloud computer also called a cloud
instance.

1. Create an account at AWS

2. Log in to AWS

3. Choose EC2 from the Services menu

4. (Optional) In the top-right corner select the region that is closest to you.

5. Click Launch Instance

6. Choose Amazon Linux

7. Click Review and Launch and on the next page click Launch
8. You can select Create a new key pair in the pop-up window and give it any name
you want.

9. Click Launch Instance

10. Save the .pem file somewhere you’ll remember. This is your AWS key and we
will need it later

11. Click View Instances

After a short while you should see that a new instance is up and running. You can see
this on the AWS browser page under Instances.

2. Connect to the cloud computer

1. Open the Terminal on Mac or Linux

2. You first need to change the access permissions of your AWS key file:
$ chmod 400 [Link]

3. We now ssh into the cloud computer. This will create a secure connection
between our laptop and the cloud
$ ssh -i /path/[Link] ec2-user@public_dns_name

If all went well, you are now remotely logged in to your cloud computer.

3. Setup Python on the cloud

Your instance should come with Python 2.7 pre-installed. I will install Python 3
below. To see the Python-related packages available for install on your cloud
computer type:
$ yum list | grep python

yum is a package manager for Linux and grep is a search command applied to the
output of yum (this is what the | sign achieves). grep looks for anything with
“python” in the output of yum.

To install Python 3:
$ sudo yum install python35

The sudo prefix ensures that the above command is run with administrator privileges,
which is necessary to install stuff.

To install Python packages with pip (Python package manager), I also needed to run:
$ sudo yum install python35-devel$ sudo yum install gcc

4. Set up a Python virtual environment

It is best practice to set up a Python virtual environment and install any new packages
there instead of installing packages in the Python root.

To create a virtual environment for Python 3

$ virtualenv -p python3 venv

You can choose a name other then “venv” for your virtual environment.

To activate the virtual environment

$ source venv/bin/activate

You can later deactivate the virtual environment by typing

$ deactivate

As an example, we can now install the Python package scrapy, a webscraping

framework, with pip install.
$ pip install scrapy

5. Run a Python script

Create a blank Python script:

$ vi [Link]

Press i to enter insert mode and type the following code.

import timefor i in range(1000, -1, -1):
print(“Time remaining: {}”.format(i))
[Link](1)

To exit the vi editor, first press Esc to exit insert mode and then press :x. This will
also save the file.

Run the script:

$ python [Link]

6. Upload Python code from your own machine

If you would like to upload existing code from your machine, use the secure copy
command below.
$ scp -ri ~/documents/path/[Link] ~/documents/path/example/
ec2-user@ec2–23–21–11–[Link]:/home/ec2-user

Replace the above two files paths with the path to your AWS key and the folder
containing the Python code. You can find out the last parameter that is needed above
by right-clicking on the instance you have just started and selecting Connect.

The option -r is for recursive copy as we are copying a complete folder and
option -i stands for identity_file to provide the path to your AWS key.

If you are only uploading a single file, the -r option is not necessary.

7. Keep your Python script alive and running

To keep Python running even after you disconnect from the cloud instance we
install tmux.
$ sudo yum install tmux

Start tmux
$ tmux
Run the Python script inside tmux
$ python [Link]

Press CTRL + B and type :detach. This will exit tmux, but the Python script will still
be running in the background. Disconnect from the cloud by typing.
$ ~.

Reconnect to the cloud.

$ ssh -i “~/documents/path/[Link]”
ec2-user@ec2–23–21–59–[Link]:/home/ec2-user

Remember to change the above parameters to the ones you are using.

Enter tmux and see the Python code at work:

$ tmux attach

At this point, you should see our Python script running.

To stop the script, press CTRL + B and type:

:kill-session

8. Stop the cloud computer

On the AWS browser page under Instances, right-click the instance you want to
terminate, select Instance State and select Terminate. This is also when billing stops.

Lab 2 : Explore public cloud services like Amazon, Google, Sales Force, Digital
Ocean etc
With the public cloud raging the market, virtual hardware is shared by many
companies. The multi-employer environment makes it easy to differentiate
infrastructure costs for multiple users. Due to cost benefits and payment model, the
public cloud is suitable for small and medium-sized businesses. In general, sensitive,
community-oriented web applications that can receive unexpected traffic can increase
the cloud mass very well.
While defining the cloud strategy for their business, enterprises can choose between a
public cloud, a private cloud or a hybrid cloud for efficient scaling. The choice
depends on several factors such as the type of business application, the costs
involved, the technical specifications, and other business requirements. In this blog,
we will take a closer look at the social cloud and its benefits for businesses.

The public cloud is the most popular computer model. In this case, cloud service
providers use the Internet and make services such as infrastructure, storage, servers
etc. available for businesses. Third-party providers own and use shared physical
hardware and provide that to companies according to their needs. Amazon Elastic
Compute Cloud (EC2), IBM Blue Cloud, Google App Engine, Sun Cloud, Microsoft
Azure are some of the most popular cloud providers in the community.

Let us get a close look into the top 3 cloud vendors that are high in demand with the
IT sector.

● Amazon Web Services (AWS)

● Microsoft Azure
● Google Cloud Platform
Other cloud service providers preceding the top 3 are DigitalOcean, IBM Cloud, Dell
Technologies/ VMware, CISCO Systems, Salesforce, Oracle etc.
Amazon Web Services:

● Popularly known as AWS, Amazon Web Services is the leading cloud service
provider with a 33% market share.

● AWS assists firms by providing quality services and supporting their businesses.
One can run their business on a mobile phone or desktop. In addition, the user
should focus only on creating the code and ignoring other features.

Microsoft Azure:

● Back in 2017, Gartner called Azure a top leader in the Cloud Infrastructure as a
service space.
● Globally, 90% of Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Azure to run their
business.
● Using the deeply integrated Azure cloud services, businesses can quickly build,
deploy and manage simple and complex systems with ease.
● Azure supports multiple programming languages, frameworks, operating systems,
information, and devices, allowing businesses to use the tools and technologies
they rely on.

Google Cloud Platform:

● With precise looks, low cost, attractive features and flexible computer options,
GCP is an attractive option for both AWS and Azure. It uses complete encryption
for all data and communication channels including traffic between data centres.
● Some of the areas where Google Cloud competes fiercely with AWS include
model setting and payment, privacy and traffic security, cost-effectiveness, and
machine learning.
● While all three cloud providers offer up to 75% discounts on a one- to three-year
commitment, Google Cloud additionally offers up to 30% continuous user
discount on each model that works for more than 25% per month.
● Google Cloud offers several in-house APIs related to computer viewing, native
language processing and translation. Machine learning engineers can create
models based on the Cloud Machine Learning Engine open-source TensorFlow
open-source learning.

Conclusion:

Focusing your IT team on projects that can bring in more revenue rather than
working furiously to manage on-premises systems is a predominant priority to most
IT companies. With finite resources, companies are looking to adopt cloud models
that can cater to their multiple IT requirements. Cloud-native technologies empower
organizations to build and run scalable SRP-based microservers-based applications in
modern, dynamic environments.