WHAT IS CLOUD COMPUTING 1. Definition
There are many definitions of cloud computing due to its fast development and vast number of research papers associated with it. A definition from the NIST Working Definition of Cloud Computing published by the U.S.Government's National Institute of Standards and Technology is “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”
The above definition is by far the clearest and most comprehensive definition of cloud computing and is widely used in researches and papers. It points out five main characteristics of cloud computing which are: * On-demand self-service: cloud providers allow their computing resources such as processing power, storage, virtual machine, etc. to be acquired and used anytime their customer needs without the interaction of human being. * Broad network access: the provided services can be accessed through a network (typically the Internet) from a variety of devices such as laptops or smartphones. * Resources pooling: the same resources are shared over many users. This referred to as multi-tenancy where for example a physical server can host multiple virtual machines belong to different users. * Rapid elasticity: resources from the cloud can be quickly scale up, when demanded, or down, when no longer required, according to the user’s need. * Measured service: resources usage is measured using appropriate metrics.
2. Related Technologies
Cloud computing is often compared with the following technologies, each of them shared certain aspect of cloud computing and they bring different benefits to cloud computing.
Grid Computing: grid computing is the combination of compute resources from