Infrastructure of Cloud Computing

Introduction

• Cloud infrastructure means the hardware and software components.
• These components are server, storage, networking and virtualization software.
• These components are required to support the computing requirements of a cloud computing model.

Components of Cloud infrastructure

• Hypervisor is a firmware or low-level program. It acts as a Virtual Machine Manager.
• It enables to share a physical instance of cloud resources between several customers.

• Management software assists to maintain and configure the infrastructure.

• Deployment software assists to deploy and integrate the application on the cloud.

• Network is the key component of the cloud infrastructure.
• It enables to connect cloud services over the Internet.
• The customer can customize the network route and protocol i.e possible to deliver network as a utility over the Internet.

• The server assists to compute the resource sharing and offers other services like resource allocation and deallocation, monitoring the resources, provide the security etc.

• Cloud keeps many copies of storage.  Using these copies of resources, it extracts another resource if any one of the resources fails.

Infrastructural Constraints

• Transparency
• Scalability
• Intelligent Monitoring
• Security

• In a Cloud environment, virtualization is the key to share the resources.
• It is impossible to satisfy the demand with single resource or server. Hence, there should be transparency in resources, load balancing and application, so that we can scale the resources on demand.

• Scaling up an application is easy but scaling up an application delivery solution is not easy, because it includes configuration overhead or even rearchitecting the network.
• Hence, application delivery is required to be scalable that need the virtual infrastructure so that, resources are provisioned and de-provisioned easily.

• Application solution delivery is required to be capable of intelligent monitoring to achieve transparency and scalability.

• In security, the mega data center in the cloud must be securely architected.
• The control node, an entry point in mega data center also requires to be secure.