Public Infrastructure as a Service providers commonly offer virtual servers containing one or more CPUs, running several choices of operating systems and a customized software stack. In addition, storage space and communication facilities are often provided.
Features
In spite of being based on a common set of features, IaaS offerings can be distinguished by the availability of specialized features that influence the cost_benefit ratio to be experienced by user applications when moved to the cloud. The most relevant features are: (i) geographic distribution of data centers; (ii) variety of user interfaces and APIs to access the system; (iii) specialized components and services that aid particular applications (e.g., loadbalancers, firewalls); (iv) choice of virtualization platform and operating systems; and (v) different billing methods and period (e.g., prepaid vs. post-paid, hourly vs. monthly).
Geographic Presence. To improve availability and responsiveness, a provider of worldwide services would typically build several data centers distributed around the world. For example, Amazon Web Services presents the concept of “availability zones” and “regions” for its EC2 service. Availability zones are “distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other availability zones and provide inexpensive, low-latency network connectivity to other availability zones in the same region.” Regions, in turn, “are geographically dispersed and will be in separate geographic areas or countries.”
User Interfaces and Access to Servers. Ideally, a public IaaS provider must provide multiple access means to its cloud, thus catering for various users and their preferences. Different types of user interfaces (UI) provide different levels of abstraction, the most common being graphical user interfaces (GUI), command-line tools (CLI), and Web service (WS) APIs. GUIs are preferred by end users who need to launch, customize, and monitor a few virtual servers and do not necessary need to repeat the process several times. On the other hand, CLIs offer more flexibility and the possibility of automating repetitive tasks via scripts (e.g., start and shutdown a number of virtual servers at regular intervals). WS APIs offer programmatic access to a cloud using standard HTTP requests, thus allowing complex services to be built on top of IaaS clouds.
Advance Reservation of Capacity. Advance reservations allow users to request for an IaaS provider to reserve resources for a specific time frame in the future, thus ensuring that cloud resources will be available at that time. However, most clouds only support best-effort requests; that is, users requests are server whenever resources are available. Amazon Reserved Instances is a form of advance reservation of capacity, allowing users to pay a fixed amount of money in advance to guarantee resource availability at anytime during an agreed period and then paying a discounted hourly rate when resources are in use. However, only long periods of 1 to 3 years are offered; therefore, users cannot express their reservations in finer granularities—for example, hours or days.
Automatic Scaling and Load Balancing. Elasticity is a key characteristic of the cloud computing model. Applications often need to scale up and down to meet varying load conditions. Automatic scaling is a highly desirable feature of IaaS clouds. It allow users to set conditions for when they want their applications to scale up and down, based on application-specific metrics such as transactions per second, number of simultaneous users, request latency, and so forth. When the number of virtual servers is increased by automatic scaling, incoming traffic must be automatically distributed among the available servers. This activity enables applications to promptly respond to traffic increase while also achieving greater fault tolerance.
Service-Level Agreement. Service-level agreements (SLAs) are offered by IaaS providers to express their commitment to delivery of a certain QoS. To customers it serves as a warranty. An SLA usually include availability and performance guarantees. Additionally, metrics must be agreed upon by all parties as well as penalties for violating these expectations. Most IaaS providers focus their SLA terms on availability guarantees, specifying the minimum percentage of time the system will be available during a certain period. For instance, Amazon EC2 states that “if the annual uptime Percentage for a customer drops below 99.95% for the service year, that customer is eligible to receive a service credit equal to 10% of their bill.3”
Hypervisor and Operating System Choice. Traditionally, IaaS offerings have been based on heavily customized open-source Xen deployments. IaaS providers needed expertise in Linux, networking, virtualization, metering, resource management, and many other low-level aspects to successfully deploy and maintain their cloud offerings. More recently, there has been an emergence of turnkey IaaS platforms such as VMWare vCloud and Citrix Cloud Center (C3) which have lowered the barrier of entry for IaaS competitors, leading to a rapid expansion in the IaaS marketplace.
Source of Information : Wiley - Cloud Computing Principles and Paradigms 2011
Features
In spite of being based on a common set of features, IaaS offerings can be distinguished by the availability of specialized features that influence the cost_benefit ratio to be experienced by user applications when moved to the cloud. The most relevant features are: (i) geographic distribution of data centers; (ii) variety of user interfaces and APIs to access the system; (iii) specialized components and services that aid particular applications (e.g., loadbalancers, firewalls); (iv) choice of virtualization platform and operating systems; and (v) different billing methods and period (e.g., prepaid vs. post-paid, hourly vs. monthly).
Geographic Presence. To improve availability and responsiveness, a provider of worldwide services would typically build several data centers distributed around the world. For example, Amazon Web Services presents the concept of “availability zones” and “regions” for its EC2 service. Availability zones are “distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other availability zones and provide inexpensive, low-latency network connectivity to other availability zones in the same region.” Regions, in turn, “are geographically dispersed and will be in separate geographic areas or countries.”
User Interfaces and Access to Servers. Ideally, a public IaaS provider must provide multiple access means to its cloud, thus catering for various users and their preferences. Different types of user interfaces (UI) provide different levels of abstraction, the most common being graphical user interfaces (GUI), command-line tools (CLI), and Web service (WS) APIs. GUIs are preferred by end users who need to launch, customize, and monitor a few virtual servers and do not necessary need to repeat the process several times. On the other hand, CLIs offer more flexibility and the possibility of automating repetitive tasks via scripts (e.g., start and shutdown a number of virtual servers at regular intervals). WS APIs offer programmatic access to a cloud using standard HTTP requests, thus allowing complex services to be built on top of IaaS clouds.
Advance Reservation of Capacity. Advance reservations allow users to request for an IaaS provider to reserve resources for a specific time frame in the future, thus ensuring that cloud resources will be available at that time. However, most clouds only support best-effort requests; that is, users requests are server whenever resources are available. Amazon Reserved Instances is a form of advance reservation of capacity, allowing users to pay a fixed amount of money in advance to guarantee resource availability at anytime during an agreed period and then paying a discounted hourly rate when resources are in use. However, only long periods of 1 to 3 years are offered; therefore, users cannot express their reservations in finer granularities—for example, hours or days.
Automatic Scaling and Load Balancing. Elasticity is a key characteristic of the cloud computing model. Applications often need to scale up and down to meet varying load conditions. Automatic scaling is a highly desirable feature of IaaS clouds. It allow users to set conditions for when they want their applications to scale up and down, based on application-specific metrics such as transactions per second, number of simultaneous users, request latency, and so forth. When the number of virtual servers is increased by automatic scaling, incoming traffic must be automatically distributed among the available servers. This activity enables applications to promptly respond to traffic increase while also achieving greater fault tolerance.
Service-Level Agreement. Service-level agreements (SLAs) are offered by IaaS providers to express their commitment to delivery of a certain QoS. To customers it serves as a warranty. An SLA usually include availability and performance guarantees. Additionally, metrics must be agreed upon by all parties as well as penalties for violating these expectations. Most IaaS providers focus their SLA terms on availability guarantees, specifying the minimum percentage of time the system will be available during a certain period. For instance, Amazon EC2 states that “if the annual uptime Percentage for a customer drops below 99.95% for the service year, that customer is eligible to receive a service credit equal to 10% of their bill.3”
Hypervisor and Operating System Choice. Traditionally, IaaS offerings have been based on heavily customized open-source Xen deployments. IaaS providers needed expertise in Linux, networking, virtualization, metering, resource management, and many other low-level aspects to successfully deploy and maintain their cloud offerings. More recently, there has been an emergence of turnkey IaaS platforms such as VMWare vCloud and Citrix Cloud Center (C3) which have lowered the barrier of entry for IaaS competitors, leading to a rapid expansion in the IaaS marketplace.
Source of Information : Wiley - Cloud Computing Principles and Paradigms 2011
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