Cloud Computing Architecture For Technical Educational Institutes

Cloud –a parallel & distributed system consisting of a collection of interconnected & virtualized computers that are dynamically provisioned. In this paper we are studying present situation of infrastructure provided by engineering institutes of B grade cities and suggest how cloud computing service providers can help. Local computers no longer have to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to running applications. The network of computers that make up the cloud handles them instead. Section 1 Introduces cloud computing. In section 2 we are explaining SaaS and in section 3, need of cloud infrastructure for technical institutions. Section 4 – a proposed architecture and section 5 describes benefits and drawbacks followed by conclusion.

1.    Introduction to cloud computing?

Ever growing needs of mankind has led to the growth of cloud computing. Basic essential services are commonly provided such that everyone can easily access them. Today, utility services, such as water, electricity and telecommunication are basic necessities of our daily life routines. These utility services are accessed so frequently that they need to be available whenever the consumer requires them at any time. Consumers are then able to pay service providers based on their usage of these utility services. Computing need is one such service which can be added to this list. "A Cloud is a type of parallel and distributed system consisting of a collection of interconnected and virtualized computers that are dynamically provisioned and presented as one or more unified computing resources based on service-level agreements established through negotiation between the service provider and consumers.” Cloud Computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the datacenters that provide those services. The services themselves have long been referred to as Software as a Service (SaaS), so we use that term. The datacenter hardware and software is what we will call a Cloud. Thus, Cloud Computing is the sum of SaaS and Utility Computing, but does not include Private Clouds. People can be users or providers of SaaS, or users or providers of Utility Computing.

2.    Software as a Service: Software as a service is a model of software deployment over the internet. With SaaS, a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand, either through a time subscription or a “pay-as-you-go” model. Also known as “software on demand,” the SaaS model allows vendors to develop, host and operate software for customer use.

Rather than purchase the hardware and software to run an application, customers need only a computer or a server to download the application and internet access to run the software. The software can be licensed for a single user or for a group of users. People may have different perspectives from different views. For example, from the view of end-user, the cloud computing service moves the application software and operation system from desktops to the cloud side, which makes users be able to plug-in anytime from anywhere and utilize large scale storage and computing resources. On the other hand, the cloud computing service provider may focus on how to distribute and schedule the computer resources.
It implies a service oriented architecture, reduced information technology overhead for the end-user, greater flexibility, reduced total cost of ownership, on demand services and many other things. In an SOA environment, end-users request an IT service (or an integrated collection of such services) at the desired functional, quality and capacity level, and receive it either at the time requested or at a specified later time. Service discovery, brokering, and reliability are important, and services are usually designed to interoperate, as are the composites made of these services.

It is expected that in the next 10 years, service-based solutions will be a major vehicle for delivery of information and other IT-assisted functions at both individual and organizational levels, e.g., software applications, web-based services, personal and business “desktop” computing, high-performance computing.End-users of services are the most important users. They require appropriately reliable and timely service delivery, easy-to-use interfaces, collaborative support, information about their services, etc. The distribution of services, across the network and across resources, will depend on the task complexity, desired schedules and resource constraints. Solutions should not rule out use of any network type (wire, optical, wireless) or access mode (high speed and low speed). Recently, several academic and industrial organizations have started investigating and developing technologies and infrastructure for Cloud Computing.

We studied Sun network.com (Sun Grid). It enables the user to run Solaris OS, Java, C, C++, and FORTRAN based applications. First, the user has to build and debug his applications and runtime scripts in a local development environment that is configured to be similar to that on the Sun Grid. Then, he needs to create a bundled zip archive (containing all the related scripts, libraries, executable binaries and input data) and upload it to Sun Grid. Finally, he can execute and monitor the application using the Sun Grid Web portal or API. After the completion of the application, the user will need to download the execution results to his local development environment for viewing.

3.    Need of cloud computing setup in technical institutions: We are suggesting a cloud computing architecture which can be implemented at universities (service provider) and affiliated colleges (service users) can use these services. If engineering colleges take services from university as per there requirement then capital expenditure and operational expenditure will be reduced. Colleges will pay university (service provider) as per there usage. We are considering only computer related streams of education here.

This types of cloud computing delivers a single application through the browser to thousands of customers using a multitenant architecture. On the college side, it means no upfront investment in servers or software licensing; on the provider side, with just one application to maintain, costs are low compared to conventional hosting.

Hardware and software demands on the user's side decrease. The only thing the user's computer needs to be able to run is the cloud computing system's interface software, which can be as simple as a Web browser, and the cloud's network takes care of the rest.
Instead of installing a suite of software for each computer, you'd only have to load one application. That application would allow workers to log into a Web-based service which hosts all the programs the user would need for his or her job. Remote machines owned by another company would run everything from word processing to complex data analysis programs.

Any application needs a model of computation, a model of storage, and a model of communication. The statistical multiplexing necessary to achieve elasticity and the illusion of infinite capacity requires each of these resources to be virtualized to hide the implementation of how they are multiplexed and shared. Our view is that different utility computing offerings will be distinguished based on the level of abstraction presented to the programmer and the level of management of the resources.


It is comprised of two significant parts: the front end and the back end. The front end is the side at which the user of the computer or the client himself is able to access i.e. at the college end.  This involves the client’s network or his computer and the program or programs that he uses to access the database or the servers that contain all the data.  The back end of the cloud computing architecture is the cloud itself, which is the collection of all related information saved in the servers that the client wishes to have access to.  These two ends of the cloud computing architecture are connected through a network, usually the Internet, because it provides remote access to all the users of the cloud. The cloud computing technology requires specific software and hardware for it to function the way its users want it to be. For large-scale businesses, the cloud computing technology eliminates the need to buy an additional number of hardware for all employees, since all data needed would be easily accessible through the individual computers.

Installing software in every computer would no longer be necessary: because the cloud computing platform would be able to do the job.  The cloud computing platform contains all the necessary functions and software for easy access and computing of the cloud.

3.1 Working:

3.1.1 User Interaction Interface: The functioning will be through user interaction interface. When a service request is first submitted, it goes to system management and service catalog.

3.1.2 System Management & Service Catalog tool: The System management tool with interact with service catalog to interpret the submitted request for requirements before determining whether to accept or reject the request. Service catalog will contain all the data regarding which user have access to which services. Thus, it ensures that there is no overloading of resources whereby many service requests cannot be fulfilled successfully due to limited resources available. It also needs the latest status information regarding resource availability and workload processing in order to make resource allocation decisions effectively. System management tool also submits all the data to monitoring and metering system after providing service to the user.

3.1.3 Monitoring and metering system: Monitoring and metering system takes care of performance monitoring of applications and streamlining processing costs as result of cloud computing service charges. Fortunately there is a common solution to tackling both challenges that offers to make the cost of both the operation and quality of an IT service delivered transparent, measurable and manageable. A solution that allows one to explicitly model the relation between the performance of an IT service and its operating costs when delivered at particular levels of quality (performance) to consumers – activity-based costing (ABC). Or it can also be based on submission time (peak/off-peak), pricing rates (fixed/ changing) or availability of resources (supply/demand).

3.1.4 Provisioning tool: Then, it assigns requests to provisioning tool which carves out the systems from the cloud to deliver on the requested service. It will assign the task as per requirement of the request to the physical machines present in the cloud.

3.1.5 Cloud of servers: Physical Machines: The Data Center comprises multiple computing servers that provide resources to meet service demands.

4.    How will this help educational institutions?
Institutions are required to provide software as and when syllabus modifications take place. Cloud computing systems give these Institutions wide access to computer applications. They don't have to buy a set of software or software licenses for every student. Instead, they can pay a metered fee to a cloud computing service provider. It could bring hardware costs down. Cloud computing systems would reduce the need for advanced hardware on the user side. They wouldn't need to buy the fastest computer with the most memory, because the cloud system would take care of those needs for them. Instead, they can buy an inexpensive computer terminal. The terminal could include a monitor, input devices like a keyboard and mouse and just enough processing power to run the middleware necessary to connect to the cloud system. Institutions might save money on IT support and maintenance. Often, scientists and researchers work with calculations so complex that it would take years for individual computers to complete them. On the proposed system, the client could send the calculation to the cloud for processing. The cloud system would tap into the processing power of all available computers on the back end, significantly speeding up the calculation. Faculties who wish to do research will get help. Fast implementation With SaaS, an educational institution can be up and running in days or weeks.

SaaS is generally associated by software professionals and business associates with business software and is typically thought of as a low-cost way for businesses to obtain rights to use software as needed versus licensing all devices with all applications. On-demand licensing enables the benefits of commercially licensed use without the associated complexity and potential high initial cost of equipping every device with the applications that are only used when needed. If we change present lab status with the architecture proposed using cloud computing then the following chart shows colleges can save lot of efforts in setting up of labs and ever going need of maintenance.
 
Figure 2. Rate of efforts saved using proposed architecture

5.    Conclusion: Over the past few years, the concept of cloud computing and virtualization has gained much momentum and has become a more popular phrase in information technology. Many organizations have started implementing these new technologies to further reduce costs through improved machine utilization, reduced administration time and infrastructure costs. Cloud computing is the environment that enables customers to use applications on the Internet such as storing and protecting data while providing a service. In this paper we have studied cloud computing – SaaS in particular and suggested how it can be beneficial to technical institutes.

6.    References

1.    http://www.opennebula.org/software:ecosystem:haizea
2.    McKinsey Quarterly (2007) “Delivering Software as a Service”. May.
3.    Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos on Animoto [online]. April 2008. Available from: http://blog.animoto.com/2008/ 04/21/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-on-animoto/.
4.    http://mags.acm.org/communications/201004
5.    Michael Armbrust, Armando Fox, Rean Griffith, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy Katz, Andy Konwinski, Gunho Lee, David Patterson, Ariel Rabkin, Ion Stoica, and Matei Zaharia, (2009) “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing”,  February 10.
6.    Rajkumar Buyya, Chee Shin Yeo, and Srikumar Venugopal –“ Market-Oriented Cloud Computing: Vision, Hype, and Reality for Delivering IT Services as Computing Utilities”.