Abstracto

CLOUD COMPUTING: AN OVERVIEW

Anju Gautam and Rahul Pareek

“Cloud” is a collective term for a large number of developments and possibilities. It is not an invention, but more of a “practical innovation”, combining several earlier inventions into something new and compelling. Much like the iPod is comprised of several existing concepts and technologies (the Walkman, MP3 compression and a portable hard disk), cloud computing merges several already available technologies: high bandwidth networks, virtualization, Web 2.0 interactivity, time sharing, and browser interfaces. Cloud Computing is a popular phrase that is shorthand for applications that were developed to be rich Internet applications that run on the Internet (or “Cloud”). Cloud computing enables tasks to be assigned to a combination of software and services over a network. This network of servers is the cloud. Cloud computing can help businesses transform their existing server infrastructures into dynamic environments, expanding and reducing server capacity depending on their requirements. A cloud computing platform dynamically provisions, configures, reconfigures, and deprovisions servers as needed. Servers in the cloud can be physical machines or virtual machines. Advanced clouds typically include other computing resources such as storage area networks (SANs), network equipment, firewall and other security devices.