BigGyan Cloud ELearning - Types of Clouds

Clouds in Cloud Computing An Interesting Analogy


Cloud computing has been defined in various ways. The definition that mostly aptly describes it is - Cloud computing is a computing paradigm where the boundaries of computing will be determined by economic rationale rather than technical limits. Given by Prof. Ramnath K. Chellappa (currently at Goizueta Business School, Emory University).


Cloud computing is about dissociating business applications from the underlying infrastructure. Cloud computing customers do not generally own the physical infrastructure serving as host to the software platform in question. Instead, they avoid capital expenditure by renting usage from a third-party provider.


This introduces a "gap" between the physical infrastructure "The Earth" and business applications "The Cloud". It is exactly like consuming electricity from the grid rather than generating your own. Consumers consume resources as a service and pay only for resources that they use.


Cirrus Clouds - High Clouds


These are private cloud not accessible to public and are used for private/Internal environments. They are used within an enterprise. Cirrus clouds provide a cloud environment behind a company's firewall. They include a set of applications with underlying infrastructure and includes resource management and dynamic allocation.


They are suited for for Enterprises and Corporates with large scale IT for their core and strategic applications. However, they take minimal advantages of cloud computing as enterprises using them have to maintain data centers. However, they do help in reducing expenditure (both Capex and Opex). Further, quality of service improves.


The term has also been used in the logical rather than physical sense, for example in reference to platform as a service offerings, though such offerings including Microsoft's Azure Services Platform are not available for on-premises deployment.


Altostratus Clouds- Hybrid Clouds


These are medium clouds used in hybrid environments which are partly private and partly public. A cloud environment in which external services are leveraged to extend or supplement the internal cloud - simply put, a mixture of both private and public cloud At the base there is a Cirrus cloud (private) which has connections with various Cumulus Clouds (public). Enterprises will adopt more and more of the Cumulus cloud. Altostratus Clouds are going to be there as there will be some apps that companies will not go lower. Overflow management and peak adaptation via Public Cloud.


Stratus Clouds - Public Clouds


These are low clouds. Public. Cumulus clouds provide a cloud environment which exists outside a company's firewall. They are offered as a service by a 3rd party vendor (eg. Amazon EC2, Sun OCP, Google AppEngine). They have huge adoption by SMEs specially. Enterprises are still testing them though. Large Enterprises are not likely to move their core or strategic applications onto Public Cloud in the short to medium time frame. Especially, because Corporates and large Enterprises have existing Data Centres running their mission critical applications. But in the long time frame as the Cumulus clouds mature, gain trust and are able to provide strong SLAs they will host most of the apps in all organizations. Just like we use most of our electricity from public grid rather than generators.


Cumulonimbus Clouds - Vertically developed Clouds


Google, Salesforce, Intuit, Some small players are BigGyan, Zoho and many more. They are interconnected. Salesforce and Google are integrated. BigGyan and Google are integrated. We are integrating BigGyan with Intuit and Salesforce. They have the best chance of becoming standards as provide plug'n'play type functionality for users. Sign-up for one of the vertically developed clouds and in due course as and when required start using apps from other vertically developed cloud.


Conclusion


As time goes on, the hybrid cloud will develop into vertically developed clouds. The current clouds are attracting more and more apps to connect with them. As the app base increases more and more people people move on to the cloud for various things. SECURITY is of prime important for the cloud model.


Diipak Gupta graduated from PEC, Chandigarh in Electronics and Communication. The main skill he acquired at college was his maverickity. Views engineering as a creative activity - has applied several patents in the domain of mobile phones and IPTV. Completed Masters from BITS, Pilani in Consciousness Studies (often called last frontier of science). Published papers in the field. Other keen activities include being an educator, internet evangelist and a self-proclaimed eLearning Guru.