Cloud Computing Foundation: Definition, Reference Architecture, Foundational Technologies, Use Cases

In this chapter, we discuss the foundation of Cloud Computing, starting with the Cloud Computing definition and overviewing the underlying technologies. Cloud Computing technologies are emerging as a common way of provisioning infrastructure services, applications and general computing and storag e resources on-demand. Despite existence of the large Cloud Services Providers (CSP) that can offer the full stack of services and resources for any of use cases, cloud based applications and infrastructures may involve multiple providers and multi-domain resources, including integration with the enterprise legacy services and infrastructures. Clouds represent a new step in the evolutional computing and communication technologies development chain by introducing a new type of services and a new abstraction layer for the general infrastructure services virtualisation, portability and automatic provisioning. Current development of the cloud technologies demonstrates movement to developing Intercloud/multicloud models, architectures and integration tools that could allow integrating cloud based infrastructure services into existing enterprise and campus infrastructures, on the one hand, and provide common/interoperable environment for moving existing infrastructures and infrastructure services to the virtualised cloud environment, on the other hand. Cloud based virtualisation allows for easy upgrade and/or migration of enterprise applications, including also the whole IT infrastructure segments. This brings significant cost saving comparing to traditional enterprise hosted infrastructure deployment and management that requires a lot of manual work.