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table of contents table of contents cloud computing at a higher level 4 why cloud computing 5 clouds much more than cheap computing 5 it efficiency on a whole new scale 6 faster more flexible programming 7 compelling new opportunities the cloud ecosystem 8 how did cloud computing start 9 harnessing cloud computing 0 use the cloud 0 leverage the cloud 0 build the cloud be the cloud public private and hybrid clouds cloud computing defined cornerstone technologies .3 the architectural services layers of cloud computing 3 software as a service saas 3 platform as a service paas 4 infrastructure as a service iaas 4 inside the cloud .4 virtualization 5 operating system virtualization .6 platform virtualization .6 network virtualization .6 application virtualization 7 sun cloud computing |

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table of contents software deployment 7 software packaging 7 machine images 8 sun s cloud philosophies 8 open source and interoperability .8 comprehensive product portfolio .9 enterprise-grade systemic qualities .9 efficiency/economy 0 reliability/availability 0 density/scalability 0 agility .0 security new sun technologies relevant to the cloud virtualization modular systems 3 open storage 3 what you can do .5 copyright 1994-2009 sun microsystems inc sun cloud computing 3

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cloud computing at a higher level cloud computing at a higher level in many ways cloud computing is simply a metaphor for the internet the increasing movement of compute and data resources onto the web but there s a difference cloud computing represents a new tipping point for the value of network computing it delivers higher efficiency massive scalability and faster easier software development it s about new programming models new it infrastructure and the enabling of new business models for those developers and enterprises who want to embrace cloud computing sun is developing critical technologies to deliver enterprise scale and systemic qualities to this new paradigm interoperability while most current clouds offer closed platforms and vendor lock-in developers clamor for interoperability sun s open-source product strategy and javatm principles are focused on providing interoperability for large-scale computing resources think of the existing cloud islands merging into a new interoperable intercloud where applications can be moved to and operate across multiple platforms high-density horizontal computing sun is pioneering high-power-density compute-node architectures and extreme-scale infiniband fabrics as part of our top-tier hpc deployments this high-density technology is being incorporated into our large-scale cloud designs data in the cloud more than just compute utilities cloud computing is increasingly about petascale data sun s open storage products offer hybrid data servers with unprecedented efficiency and performance for the emerging data-intensive computing applications that will become a key part of the cloud these technology bets are focused on driving more efficient large-scale cloud deployments that can provide the infrastructure for next-generation business opportunities social networks algorithmic trading continuous risk analysis and so on sun cloud computing 4

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why cloud computing why cloud computing the rise of the cloud is more than just another platform shift that gets geeks excited it will undoubtedly transform the it industry but it will also profoundly change the way people work and companies operate the economist let it rise 0/3/08 clouds much more than cheap computing cloud computing brings a new level of efficiency and economy to delivering it resources on demand and in the process it opens up new business models and market opportunities while many people think of current cloud computing offerings as purely pay by the drink compute platforms they re really a convergence of two major interdependent it trends it efficiency minimize costs where companies are converting their it costs from capital expenses to operating expenses through technologies such as virtualization cloud computing begins as a way to improve infrastructure resource deployment and utilization but fully exploiting this infrastructure eventually leads to a new application development model business agility maximize return using it as a competitive weapon through rapid time to market integrated application stacks instant machine image deployment and petascale parallel programming cloud computing is embraced as a critical way to revolutionize time to service but inevitably these services must be built on equally innovative rapid-deployment-infrastructure models to be sure these trends have existed in the it industry for years however the recent emergence of massive network bandwidth and virtualization technologies has enabled this transformation to a new services-oriented infrastructure cloud computing enables it organizations to increase hardware utilization rates dramatically and to scale up to massive capacities in an instant without constantly having to invest in new infrastructure train new personnel or license new software it also creates new opportunities to build a better breed of network services in less time for less money sun cloud computing 5

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why cloud computing by 2011 early technology adopters will forgo capital expenditures and instead purchase 40 of their it infrastructure as a service `cloud computing will take off thus untying applications from specific infrastructure gartner press release gartner highlights key predictions for it organisations and users in 008 and beyond /3/08 it efficiency on a whole new scale cloud computing is all about efficiency it provides a way to deploy and access everything from single systems to huge amounts of it resources on demand in real time at an affordable cost it makes high-performance compute and high-capacity storage available to anyone with a credit card and since the best cloud strategies build on concepts and tools that developers already know clouds also have the potential to redefine the relationship between information technology and the developers and business units that depend on it reduce capital expenditures cloud computing makes it possible for companies to convert it costs from capital expense to operating expense through technologies such as virtualization cut the cost of running a datacenter cloud computing improves infrastructure utilization rates and streamlines resource management for example clouds allow for self-service provisioning through apis bringing a higher level of automation to the datacenter and reducing management costs eliminate overprovisioning cloud computing provides scaling on demand which when combined with utility pricing removes the need to overprovision to meet demand with cloud computing companies can scale up to massive capacities in an instant for those who think cloud computing is just fluff take a closer look at the cloud offerings that are already available major internet providers amazon.com google and others are leveraging their infrastructure investments and sharing their large-scale economics already the bandwidth used by amazon web services aws exceeds that associated with their core e-tailing services forward-looking enterprises of all types from web .0 startups to global enterprises are embracing cloud computing to reduce infrastructure costs the new york times needed to convert million articles and images in its archive from 85 to 980 to pdf their internal it said it would take them seven weeks in the meantime one developer using 00 amazon ec simple web service interface instances running hadoop an open-source implementation similar to mapreduce completed the job in 4 hours for less than $300 open.blogs.nytimes.com self-service prorated super computing fun 07 open.blogs.nytimes.com/007 0/self-service-prorated-super-computing-fun sun cloud computing 6

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why cloud computing faster more flexible programming cloud computing isn t only about hardware it s also a programming revolution agile easy-to-access lightweight web protocols coupled with pervasive horizontally scaled architecture can accelerate development cycles and time to market with new applications and services new business functions are now just a script away accelerated cycles the cloud computing model provides a faster more efficient way to develop the new generation of applications and services faster development and testing cycles means businesses can accomplish in hours what used to take days weeks or months increase agility cloud computing accommodates change like no other model for example animoto productions makers of a mashup tool that creates video from images and music used cloud computing to scale up from 50 servers to 3,500 in just three days cloud computing can also provide a wider selection of more lightweight and agile development tools simplifying and speeding up the development process the immediate impact will be unprecedented flexibility in service creation and accelerated development cycles but at the same time development flexibility could become constrained by apis if they re not truly open cloud computing can usher in a new era of productivity for developers if they build on platforms that are designed to be federated rather than centralized but there s a major shift underway in programming culture and the languages that will be used in clouds what sthenextwebstack sun cloud computing 7

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why cloud computing today the integrated optimized open-source apache mysql php/perl/python amp stack is the preferred platform for building and deploying new web applications and services cloud computing will be the catalyst for the adoption of an even newer stack of more lightweight agile tools such as lighttpd an open-source web server hadoop the free java software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications and mogilefs a file system that enables horizontal scaling of storage across any number of machines compelling new opportunities the cloud ecosystem but cloud computing isn t just about a proliferation of xen image stacks on a restricted handful of infrastructure providers it s also about an emerging ecosystem of complementary services that provide computing resources such as on-ramps for cloud abstraction professional services to help in deployment specialized application components such as distributed databases and virtual private datacenters for the entire range of it providers and consumers these services span the range of customer requirements from individual developers and small startups to large enterprises and they continue to expand the levels of virtualization a key architectural component of the cloud that offers ever-higher abstractions of underlying services sun cloud computing 8

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why cloud computing how did cloud computing start at a basic level cloud computing is simply a means of delivering it resources as services almost all it resources can be delivered as a cloud service applications compute power storage capacity networking programming tools even communications services and collaboration tools cloud computing began as large-scale internet service providers such as google amazon and others built out their infrastructure an architecture emerged massively scaled horizontally distributed system resources abstracted as virtual it services and managed as continuously configured pooled resources this architectural model was immortalized by george gilder in his october 006 wired magazine article titled the information factories the server farms gilder wrote about were architecturally similar to grid computing but where grids are used for loosely coupled technical computing applications this new cloud model was being applied to internet services in this architecture the data is mostly resident on servers `somewhere on the internet and the application runs on both the `cloud servers and the user s browser eric schmidt in `information factories by g gilder both clouds and grids are built to scale horizontally very efficiently both are built to withstand failures of individual elements or nodes both are charged on a per-use basis but while grids typically process batch jobs with a defined start and end point cloud services can be continuous what s more clouds expand the types of resources available file storage databases and web services and extend the applicability to web and enterprise applications at the same time the concept of utility computing became a focus of it design and operations as nick carr observed in his book the big switch computing services infrastructure was beginning to parallel the development of electricity as a utility wouldn t it be great if you could purchase compute resources on demand only paying for what you need when you need it for end users cloud computing means there are no hardware acquisition costs no software licenses or upgrades to manage no new employees or consultants to hire no facilities to lease no capital costs of any kind and no hidden costs just a metered per-use rate or a fixed subscription fee use only what you want pay only for what you use cloud computing actually takes the utility model to the next level it s a new and evolved form of utility computing in which many different types of resources hardware software storage communications and so on can be combined and recombined on the fly into sun cloud computing 9

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why cloud computing the specific capabilities or services customers require from cpu cycles for hpc projects to storage capacity for enterprise-grade backups to complete ides for software development cloud computing can deliver virtually any it capability in real time under the circumstances it is easy to see that a broad range of organizations and individuals would like to purchase computing as a service and those firms already building hyperscale distributed data centers would inevitably choose to begin offering this infrastructure as a service harnessing cloud computing so how does an individual or a business take advantage of the cloud computing trend it s not just about loading machine images consisting of your entire software stack onto a public cloud like aws there are several different ways to exploit this infrastructure and explore the ecosystem of new business models use the cloud the number and quality of public commercially available cloud-based service offerings is growing fast using the cloud is often the best option for startups research projects web .0 developers or niche players who want a simple low-cost way to load and go if you re an internet startup today you will be mandated by your investors to keep you it spend to a minimum this is certainly what the cloud is for leverage the cloud typically enterprises are using public clouds for specific functions or workloads the cloud is an attractive alternative for development and testing this is perhaps the easiest cloud use case for enterprises not just startup developers why wait to order servers when you don t even know if the project will pass the proof of concept functional offloading you can use the cloud for specific workloads for example smugmug does its image thumbnailing as a batch job in the cloud we really don t want to operate datacenters anymore we d rather spend our time giving our customers great service and writing great software than managing physical hardware don macaskill ceo smugmug sun cloud computing 0

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why cloud computing augmentation clouds give you a new option for handling peak load or anticipated spikes in demand for services this is a very attractive option for enterprises but also potentially one of the most difficult use cases success is dependent on the statefulness of the application and the interdependence with other datasets that may need to be replicated and load-balanced across the two sites experimenting why download demos of new software and then install license and test it in the future software evaluation can be performed in the cloud before licenses or support need to be purchased build the cloud many large enterprises understand the economic benefits of cloud computing but want to ensure strict enforcement of security policies so they re experimenting first with private clouds see section .4 with a longer-term option of migrating mature enterprise applications to a cloud that s able to deliver the right service levels other companies may simply want to build private clouds to take advantage of the economics of resource pools and standardize their development and deployment processes be the cloud this category includes both cloud computing service providers and cloud aggregators companies that offer multiple types of cloud services as enterprises and service providers gain experience with the cloud architecture model and confidence in the security and access-control technologies that are available many will decide to deploy externally facing cloud services the phenomenal growth rates of some of the public cloud offerings available today will no doubt accelerate the momentum amazon s ec was introduced only two years ago and officially graduated from beta to general availability in october 008 cloud service providers can · · · · provide new routes to market for startups and web .0 application developers offer new value-added capabilities such as analytics derive a competitive edge through enterprise-level slas help enterprise customers develop their own clouds if you re building large datacenters today you should probably be thinking about whether you re going to offer cloud services sun cloud computing |

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cloud computing defined public private and hybrid clouds a company may choose to use a service provider s cloud or build its own but is it always all or nothing sun sees an opportunity to blend the advantages of the two primary options public clouds are run by third parties and jobs from many different customers may be mixed together on the servers storage systems and other infrastructure within the cloud end users don t know who else s job may be me running on the same server network or disk as their own jobs private clouds are a good option for companies dealing with data protection and service-level issues private clouds are on-demand infrastructure owned by a single customer who controls which applications run and where they own the server network and disk and can decide which users are allowed to use the infrastructure but even those who feel compelled in the short term to build a private cloud will likely want to run applications both in privately owned infrastructure and in the public cloud space this gives rise to the concept of a hybrid cloud hybrid clouds combine the public and private cloud models you own parts and share other parts though in a controlled way hybrid clouds offer the promise of on-demand externally provisioned scale but add the complexity of determining how to distribute applications across these different environments while enterprises may be attracted to the promise of a hybrid cloud this option at least initially will likely be reserved for simple stateless applications that require no complex databases or synchronization cloud computing defined it s one of the foundations of the next generation of computing it s a world where the network is the platform for all computing where everything we think of as a computer today is just a device that connects to the big computer we re building cloud computing is a great way to think about how we ll deliver computing services in the future tim o reilly ceo o reilly media sun cloud computing |

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cloud computing defined cornerstone technology while the basic technologies of cloud computing such as horizontally scaled distributed compute nodes have been available for some time virtualization the abstraction of computer resources is the cornerstone technology for all cloud architectures with the ability to virtualize servers behind a hypervisor-abstracted operating system storage devices desktops and applications a wide array of it resources can now be allocated on demand the dramatic growth in the ubiquitous availability of affordable high-bandwidth networking over the past several years is equally critical what was available to only a small percentage of internet users a decade ago is now offered to the majority of internet users in north america europe and asia high bandwidth which allows massive compute and data resources to be accessed from the browser virtualized resources can truly be anywhere in the cloud not just across gigabit datacenter lans and wans but also via broadband to remote programmers and end users additional enabling technologies for cloud computing can deliver it capabilities on an absolutely unprecedented scale just a few examples sophisticated file systems such as zfs can support virtually unlimited storage capacities integration of the file system and volume management snapshots and copy-on-write clones on-line integrity checking and repair patterns in architecture allow for accelerated development of superscale cloud architectures by providing repeatable solutions to common problems new techniques for managing structured unstructured and semistructured data can provide radical improvements in data-intensive computing machine images can be instantly deployed dramatically simplifying and accelerating resource allocation while increasing it agility and responsiveness the architectural services layers of cloud computing while the first revolution of the internet saw the three-tier or n-tier model emerge as a general architecture the use of virtualization in clouds has created a new set of layers applications services and infrastructure these layers don t just encapsulate on-demand resources they also define a new application development model and within each layer of abstraction there are myriad business opportunities for defining services that can be offered on a pay-per-use basis software as a service saas saas is at the highest layer and features a complete application offered as a service ondemand via multitenancy meaning a single instance of the software runs on the sun cloud computing 3

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inside the cloud provider s infrastructure and serves multiple client organizations the most widely known example of saas is salesforce.com but there are now many others including the google apps offering of basic business services such as e-mail of course salesforce.com s multitenant application has preceded the definition of cloud computing by a few years on the other hand like many other players in cloud computing salesforce.com now operates at more than one cloud layer with its release of force.com a companion application development environment or platform as a service platform as a service paas the middle layer or paas is the encapsulation of a development environment abstraction and the packaging of a payload of services the archetypal payload is a xen image part of amazon web services containing a basic web stack for example a linux distro a web server and a programming environment such as pearl or ruby paas offerings can provide for every phase of software development and testing or they can be specialized around a particular area such as content management commercial examples include google app engine which serves applications on google s infrastructure paas services such as these can provide a great deal of flexibility but may be constrained by the capabilities that are available through the provider infrastructure as a service iaas iaas is at the lowest layer and is a means of delivering basic storage and compute capabilities as standardized services over the network servers storage systems switches routers and other systems are pooled through virtualization technology for example to handle specific types of workloads from batch processing to server/storage augmentation during peak loads the best-known commercial example is amazon web services whose ec and s3 services offer bare-bones compute and storage services respectively another example is joyent whose main product is a line of virtualized servers which provide a highly scalable on-demand infrastructure for running web sites including rich web applications written in ruby on rails php python and java inside the cloud a key attraction of cloud computing is that it conceals the complexity of the infrastructure from developers and end users they don t know or need to know what s in the cloud they only care that it delivers the services they need but those who choose to build clouds for private use or as a business in itself have critical technology decisions to make in abstracting and managing underlying resources this section takes a closer look at the key architectural attributes and underlying technologies of virtualization sun cloud computing 4

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inside the cloud virtualization virtualization is a cornerstone design technique for all cloud architectures in cloud computing it refers primarily to platform virtualization or the abstraction of physical it resources from the people and applications using them virtualization allows servers storage devices and other hardware to be treated as a pool of resources rather than discrete systems so that these resources can be allocated on demand in cloud computing we re interested in techniques such as paravirtualization which allows a single server to be treated as multiple virtual servers and clustering which allows multiple servers to be treated as a single server as a means of encapsulation of physical resources virtualization solves several core challenges of datacenter managers and delivers specific advantages including higher utilization rates prior to virtualization server and storage utilization rates in enterprise datacenters typically averaged less than 50 in fact 0 to 5 utilization rates were common through virtualization workloads can be encapsulated and transferred to idle or underused systems which means existing systems can be consolidated so purchases of additional server capacity can be delayed or avoided resource consolidation virtualization allows for consolidation of multiple it resources beyond server and storage consolidation virtualization provides an opportunity to consolidate the systems architecture application infrastructure data and databases interfaces networks desktops and even business processes resulting in cost savings and greater efficiency lower power usage/costs the electricity required to run enterprise-class datacenters is no longer available in unlimited supplies and the cost is on an upward spiral for every dollar spent on server hardware an addition dollar is spent on power including the cost of running and cooling servers using virtualization to consolidate makes it possible to cut total power consumption and save significant money space savings server sprawl remains a serious problem in most enterprise datacenters but datacenter expansion is not always an option with building costs averaging several thousand dollars per square foot virtualization can alleviate the strain by consolidating many virtual systems onto fewer physical systems disaster recovery/business continuity virtualization can increase overall service-level availability rates and provide new options for disaster recovery solutions reduced operations costs the average enterprise spends $8 in maintenance for every spent on new infrastructure virtualization can change the serverto-admin ratio reduce the total administrative workload and cut total operations costs sun cloud computing 5

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