StACC White Papers
Research Challenges for Enterprise Cloud Computing
Cloud computing represents a shift away from computing as a product that is purchased, to computing as a service that is delivered to consumers over the internet from large-scale data centers – or 'clouds'. This paper discusses some of the research challenges for cloud computing from an enterprise or organizational perspective, and puts them in context by reviewing the existing body of literature in cloud computing. Various research challenges relating to the following topics are discussed: the organizational changes brought about by cloud computing; the economic and organizational implications of its utility billing model; the security, legal and privacy issues that cloud computing raises. It is important to highlight these research challenges because cloud computing is not simply about a technological improvement of data centers but a fundamental change in how IT is provisioned and used. This type of research has the potential to influence wider adoption of cloud computing in enterprise, and in the consumer market too.
Download: Research Challenges for Enterprise Cloud Computing
A performance comparison of clouds
Until recently organisations, seeking to deploy applications on a cloud, had no choice but to deploy applications on a public cloud. The public cloud service is largely dominated by the commercial Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), however there are a number of software products designed to allow organisations to create their own private and hybrid clouds. Eucalyptus is the first open source product designed for such a purpose. Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), a Linux distribution built around Eucalyptus, is purported as a complete solution for a private or hybrid cloud. This paper describes a series of tests performed in order to compare the performance of EC2 and UEC, and their suitability for meeting the challenges facing users of cloud computing. EC2 and UEC are compared in terms of memory bandwidth, storage speed and real world application performance. We show that for most computational tasks Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud offers greater performance, despite being let down on application performance by the Kernel Virtual Machine.
Download: A performance comparison of clouds
A comparison of public cloud platforms
This document discusses two Cloud Computing platforms from leading industry corporations Google
and Microsoft. An overview of each platform, its technologies, limitations and procedures is
presented. This is followed by a comparison of the platforms. This comparison is based around
StACC’s experiences in writing applications for each platform and comparing the real world
development experience.
Download: A comparison of public cloud platforms
Cloud Migration: A Case Study of Migrating an Enterprise IT System to IaaS
This case study illustrates the potential benefits and risks associated with the migration of an IT system in the oil & gas industry from an in-house data center to Amazon EC2 from a broad variety of stakeholder perspectives across the enterprise, thus transcending the typical, yet narrow, financial and technical analysis offered by providers. Our results show that the system infrastructure in the case study would have cost 37% less over 5 years on EC2, and using cloud computing could have potentially eliminated 21% of the support calls for this system. These findings seem significant enough to call for a migration of the system to the cloud but our stakeholder impact analysis revealed that there are significant risks associated with this. Whilst the benefits of using the cloud are attractive, we argue that it is important that enterprise decision-makers consider the overall organizational implications of the changes brought about with cloud computing to avoid implementing local optimizations at the cost of organization-wide performance.
Download: Cloud Migration: A Case Study of Migrating an Enterprise IT System to IaaS
An Approach to Ad hoc Cloud Computing
We consider how underused computing resources within an enterprise may be harnessed to improve utilization and create an elastic computing infrastructure. Most current cloud provision involves a data center model, in which clusters of machines are dedicated to running cloud infrastructure software. We propose an additional model, the ad hoc cloud, in which infrastructure software is distributed over resources harvested from machines already in existence within an enterprise. In contrast to the data center cloud model, resource levels are not established a priori, nor are resources dedicated exclusively to the cloud while in use. A participating machine is not dedicated to the cloud, but has some other primary purpose such as running interactive processes for a particular user. We outline the major implementation challenges and one approach to tackling them.
Download: An Approach to Ad hoc Cloud Computing
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| PerformanceComparison.pdf | 280.3 KB |
| PlatformComparison.pdf | 199.17 KB |
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