Cloud Computing: A Bird's Eye View - SERC - Indian Institute of ...

1 Introduction 

Cloud Computing: A Bird’s Eye View 

J. Lakshmi and Sathish S. Vadhiyar 

Supercomputer Education and Research Centre 

Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560 012 

{jlakshmi,vss}@serc.iisc.ernet.in 

Cloud computing refers to the latest computing technology that enables utility based computing, 

i.e. pay by use rather than the ownership of computing resources. The utility part can be hardware, 

system software or application software that can be accessed from anywhere and used anytime. 

Typically the interface used for accessing the utility is web based. 

Cloud computing is a result of evolution and convergence of several independent computing trends 

like utility computing, virtualization, distributed and grid computing, elasticity, Web2.0, service 

oriented architectures, content outsourcing and internet delivery. Thus, the cloud can be viewed as 

an extension of the Internet, wherein opportunities for using large-scale distributed computing 

infrastructure are being explored for tangible solutions to applications relevant to society and its 

businesses. 

Cloud computing, as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), covers 

the most comprehensive vision of the cloud computing model: 

“Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool 

of configurable computing resources (for example, networks, servers, storage, applications, and 

services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service 

provider interaction” (Pallis, 2010). 

Thus, cloud computing is a computing paradigm that abstracts many of the computational, data and 

software functionalities needed by a community into a virtual, remote and distributed environment. 

The term cloud refers to both the resources and the associated services that provide effective 

utilization and remote access of the resources. 

2 Cloud Computing: What is It? 

One of the core concepts in cloud computing that makes it an attractive paradigm is virtualization. 

By virtualization of the entire hardware, software, and network stack, cloud services provide a 

virtual environment of almost limitless capabilities to the user providing the flexibility to use 

resources of much larger magnitude than what is actually available. The cloud model promotes 

availability and is composed of five essential characteristics: 

1. On-demand self-service: A cloud user can locate and launch a cloud service without any 

third party help. 

2. Broad network access: Ubiquity of service access from any access device like laptop, 

mobiles, etc., and from anywhere. 

Cloud Computing-TR01 

SERC, IISc., Bangalore. 1 | 9 17 Sep. 11

3. Resource pooling: Same resource can potentially be used by simultaneous as well as many 

different users. 

4. Rapid elasticity: As the demand for the service increases, so does the availability of 

resources to support the demand. Similarly, as service demand decreases, unused resources 

are released. 

5. Measured service: A service is charged by its usage and hence measured for its usage as 

against the current models where ownership cost is associated with its use. 

A cloud can be designed to deliver three service models, namely, 

1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud: A cloud infrastructure as a service composes of 

hardware resources, aggregated using special infrastructure middleware, and projected as a 

compute service. The user, in this model, can demand, acquire and use resources in the form 

of CPU cycles or storage space. Amazon Web Services is an example of infrastructure as a 

cloud service. In this model the cloud user gets the hardware resources as a service, over 

which he needs to deploy the system and application software meeting his use. The bottom 

most layer in Figure 1 depicts this service mode. 

2. Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud: While the infrastructure as a cloud, provides the 

hardware resources as a service, the cloud platform extends this model by superimposing a 

runtime system software layer over the hardware, that can be used to deploy user 

applications. The hardware along-with the application runtime environment forms the 

service in this model. Google App Engine and MS-Windows Azure are examples of cloud 

platform as a service. The “Platform-as-a-Service” layer in Figure 1 represents this mode of 

service. 

3. Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud: A complete user application, offered as a service, forms 

the cloud software as a service. Google Docs, SalesForce, Zoho are some examples of this 

cloud service model. The “Application-as-a-Service” layer in Figure 1 represents this mode of 

service. Above this layer, other abstractions are possible, as represented by the “Business 

Process-as-a-Service” layer in Figure 1. 

The cloud architecture is captured, in its all-encompassing form, in Figure 1: 



Figure 1: Different conceptual layers of the Cloud Services Model. (Breiter, 2010) 

Further, clouds can be deployed as: 

1. Private cloud: Ownership and access is restricted to the owner or organisation. 

2. Community cloud: Collective ownership and access by the members forming a community 

based on common interest and use. 

3. Public cloud: Built for commercial use and available to general public based perhaps on 

subscription basis and through publicised modes like the Internet. 

4. Hybrid cloud: Mix on any of the above three described deployment models. 

Cloud computing also places high emphasis on seamless access through easy-to-use interfaces and 

on-demand provisioning of resources, aspects that are important for easy adoption of clouds, and 

effective resource and cost management. Typical cloud middleware components also provide 

services related to resource discovery, management, mapping, monitoring, replication, accounting, 

virtualization, problem solving environments, reliability and security. 

While a cloud is yet another large scale distributed systems setup, it is quite different from the 

traditional distributed systems from the perspective of resource access, ownership and usage. 

Clouds promote the use of self-service with an on-demand usage model. Thus, the user has the 

freedom to choose required services and only pay for its usage. This is different from current 

practices wherein large data-centres need to be owned, for using. The pay-by-use pattern has scope 

for significant reduction in the total cost of ownership (TCO) for any organisation that is intending to 



use the cloud. At the same time, clouds promote better commercial opportunities for the providers 

by allowing optimized usage of resources due to sharing by different users. 

3 Usage of Cloud Computing 

The key motivators for the cloud computing model are its features like availability (anywhere and 

anytime), elasticity (increase or decrease service capacity), pay-as-you-go (utility), and reduction in 

cost of ownership for the compute resources. Cloud computing is highly useful in many scenarios in 

scientific, administrative (governance), and commercial applications. Cloud computing infrastructure 

at the national level can address problems of diverse nature. These problems can be related to egovernance 

applications including archiving documents, sharing information about national policies, 

rules and rights, propagating education material, managing health records, processing agricultural 

information, land documents, urban planning, traffic control and coordination etc. Scientific 

applications including nanoscience, bioinformatics, climate and weather modeling, molecular 

simulations, earthquake modelling, homeland security, surveillance, reconnaissance, remote 

sensing, signal and image processing can also be addressed effectively using cloud computing. The 

storage or data cloud will act as a repository of data belonging to different domains and service data 

requests from the users and computational resources in the computational cloud. E-governance 

applications like maintaining health records, UID information, bank and property documents, and 

voting records of about one billion people can lead to huge voluminous data of many exabytes. 

Utility applications like maintaining digital libraries of books and journals, and archives related to 

different information can lead to data explosion. Further, close knit communities that can share vital 

information of mutual interest through clouds can be formed. Some interesting areas, in which 

cloud usage is emerging, worldwide, are depicted in Figure 2 and Figure 3. 

Figure 2: Emerging Customer patterns for cloud usage (Breiter, 2010). 



Figure 3: Some examples of cloud applications in the developing world (Kshetri, 2010). 

4 Cloud Computing Solutions and Infrastructures 

Numerous commercial solutions and open-source infrastructures exist for enabling cloud computing. 

4.1 Commercial Cloud Solutions 

Most of the solutions handle core cloud computing tasks including resource discovery, virtualization, 

problem solving environments, monitoring, and web services. However, the solutions differ in their 

thrust areas and the associated techniques. 

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is the most popular, robust, and standard cloud computing 

paradigm. It provides a web service through which a user can boot a customized operating system 

called Amazon Machine Image to create a virtual machine in the cloud. A user can create, launch and 

terminate virtual machine instances using simple interfaces. Amazon EC2 supports such virtual 

machine instances of different kinds. Each standard virtual machine instance has a definite 

computational and storage capacity and an associated pay-per-use price model. For example, the 

“large” virtual instance provides 7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 computer units and 160 GB of local 

instance storage with a price model of $0.34 per hour and additional charges for data transfer. 

Amazon EC2 also enables high performance computing by supporting special instances called cluster 

compute and cluster GPU instances. The EC2 cloud also provides control over geographical locations 

of instances, thereby providing latency optimization. EC2 also provides replication and reliability by 

placing instances in multiple locations or availability zones. 



Eucalyptus is an open-source cloud computing paradigm that provides high level abstractions over 

different cloud service mechanisms provided by various vendors. It predominantly uses the Amazon 

EC2 services for file systems, and other utilities. Eucalyptus provides a hierarchical cloud computing 

architecture consisting of cluster, node and storage controllers. Similar to EC2, Eucalyptus also uses 

Xen hypervisor for supporting virtualization. Besides processor virtualization, Eucalyptus also 

provides network and data storage virtualization. Eucalyptus has demonstrated its solutions for 

large-scale numerical and data mining applications. 

The Microsoft Azure cloud computing solution provides most of the services of Amazon EC2 for 

remote access of Microsoft clusters and software. The cost model followed is based on storage 

amount and amount of transactions, data transfer to locations etc. The Azure cloud also supports 

high performance computing whereby a user can remotely execute parallel applications on the 

cloud. The Azure cloud solutions have been demonstrated with real scientific and non-scientific 

applications including seismic solutions, CFD, and financial services. 

Yahoo!’s Hadoop cloud computing solution is another important paradigm that is widely used. Its 

primary purpose is to help Yahoo! web analytics, and thus specializes in processing large data sets in 

parallel with special-purpose distributed file system called HDFS. The Hadoop’s MapReduce 

framework is a popular model for data flow execution where the output from a set of map tasks are 

grouped and pipelined as inputs to the second layer of reduce tasks. Hadoop supports simple 

function mechanisms to allow users to specify the functionalities of map and reduce tasks. Hadoop 

also supports load balancing mechanisms for placing the map and reduce tasks near the needed 

data, and replications for fault tolerance. The Hadoop’s framework also supports a high level 

dataflow language and execution framework for parallel computing called Pig. 

There are also specialized cloud solutions for high performance computing like the Nimbus cloud 

that uses popular batch scheduling mechanisms like PBS or SGE to schedule virtual machines. All 

these solutions except Eucalyptus target specific hardware and software, or applications or business 

models. None of the solutions have been demonstrated for applications belonging to diverse 

scientific and non-scientific domains. 

4.2 Cloud Infrastructures 

Many cloud computing infrastructures and testbeds have been created using the above cloud 

computing solutions. Following are some examples. 

NASA’S Nebula cloud uses Eucalyptus cloud solution to enable NASA scientists and researchers to 

share large, complex data sets with external partners and the public. The primary purpose of Nebula 

was to save hundreds of staff hours needed for obtaining/providing data and installing/executing the 

necessary software for the data. A typical Nebula cloud contains about 15,000 CPU cores and 15 

petabytes of data. Another main objective is to use the cloud for effective resource usage and 

minimize idling in NASA’s large number of computing cores. Nebula provides services on-demand 

basis by commissioning and decommissioning computing capabilities. One good use case of Nebula 

is an ongoing attempt in making NASA's data accessible through Microsoft's World Wide Telescope 

platform. 



Another important testbed is the OpenCirrus cloud testbed, a collaborative effort supported by HP, 

Intel and Yahoo! in which the cloud resources are located at ten Centres of Excellence including 

academic Institutes. OpenCirrus currently supports about twenty thousand CPU cores and several 

petabytes of data. Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), one of the Institutes in the OpenCirrus effort, 

also has a partnership with Yahoo! to allow CMU academic researchers access about 4000 CPU cores 

and petabytes of data in Yahoo!’s M45 cluster. Besides, there are also research efforts related to 

military applications where soldiers can use mobile devices and offload computation intensive tasks 

like natural language processing, image and voice recognition to clouds. 

These infrastructures, however, are small-scale clouds for specific purposes. 

5 Economics of Cloud Computing 

By leveraging the power of remote cloud resources in seamless ways, end-users or clients can 

offload most of their burden related to planning, procurement, installation, learning to use, adopting 

best practices and many other complexities associated with software and hardware resources to the 

services in the cloud. This results in rapid solutions to problems, significant savings in staff hours, 

and large cost reductions for resources and manpower. This model also allows scientific community 

to spend quality time on major scientific problems without being distracted by the computational 

means to solve the problems. On the other hand, cloud providers by catering to a large community 

can adequately justify the procurement of resources and effectively utilize the resources with very 

little effort. The cloud providers can also employ intelligent cost models to obtain profitable 

payments from the clients for use of the resources. Due to these comprehensive benefits and 

business logic for all concerned entities, IT companies became major players in the development and 

adoption of cloud computing, making it the default computing mechanism, and in general promoting 

its wide acceptance. 

6 Cloud Computing: Challenges and Opportunities 

Many challenges still lie ahead for using the cloud in all its foreseen circumstances of usage. 

Significant challenges include metering of cloud service usage, performance isolation on shared 

resources, security issues associated with data privacy, protection, accessibility and jurisprudence, 

cloud interoperability to avoid vendor lock-in and assure service reliability in case of outages, 

commercial software availability and licensing on clouds based on metered usage (Armbrust, 2009). 

Novel cloud computing services related to seamless access mechanisms, automatic management 

and orchestration of data and computing, dynamic query mechanisms, algorithm building, and 

relationship determination, workflow composition and many others need to be developed to sustain 

such very large-scale cloud computing. With the increase in the cloud adoption, there is a substantial 

effort in the academic and industrial research and manufacturing sectors to fill in the perceived 

lacunae of the clouds sphere. 

7 Impact of Cloud Computing on National Missions 

Cloud computing has the potential to change the way information technology is used in the coming 

years. The impact of cloud computing, on an economy, is associated with the determinants and 

drivers of the cloud, including both, providers and users, as indicated in Figure 4. 



Figure 4: Cloud related indicators in developing countries (Kshetri, 2010). 

Cloud computing is highly beneficial enabling seamless access to complex hardware, software and 

data environments, easy adoption of large scale computing, on-demand servicing, flexible 

computational models, effective resource utilization and huge cost-cuts in terms of infrastructures 

and manpower. Specifically, in the Indian context, cloud computing can be deployed in: 

1. E-governance applications, like maintaining health records, UID information, bank and 

property documents, and voting records of about one billion people; 

2. Geographical information system putting together the available maps, satellite images, 

geospatial databases, geo-tagged tables, and crowd-sourced data, and developing a series 

of GIS Applications service for governance; 

3. Very large scale computational clouds for scientific applications such as design of transport 

aircraft, nanosecond simulations, military applications where the cloud can act as a 

command and control centre for facilitating interactions between different teams on the 

field, earthquake modeling, homeland security, surveillance, reconnaissance, remote 

sensing, signal and image processing; 

4. Utility applications like maintaining digital libraries of books and journals, and archives 

related to different information specifically pertaining to education, as a part of the 

education portal; 

5. Facilitating software usage across academic and research institutions, by providing software 

as service. This will significantly reduce the time and cost burden of the users due to 

avoiding the complex installation procedures associated with the software packages, and 

meeting the license requirements. Thus non-expert users and users with resource 

constraints including undergraduate academic institutions, government agencies and smallscale 

start-ups will be highly benefited and encouraged to solve problems of large 

magnitude. Examples of such are remote use of Matlab and Mathematica functions by the 

scientific users. 



8 Cloud Computing as a Thrust Area 

The impact of cloud computing on various national missions was discussed in detail in the previous 

section. Observing the national scenario today, data centres are deployed in dedicated access mode 

and the privilege rests with few high-end universities or R&D organisations. The cost of ownership in 

such cases is high and inhibits smaller organisations to invest in such facilities. Cloud computing 

addresses this challenge head-on and if the volume of users increases, becomes a very cost-effective 

and viable solution. As a result, it has the potential to open up high-end computing, to many smaller 

organisations, at a very economically feasible pricing. 

Cloud computing can provide easy-to-use abstraction and seamless access to diversified software, 

hardware and storage services. By providing seamless access to resources, clouds can encourage the 

general public to large-scale adoption of IT as a fundamental tool for many of the essential daily 

services, and the scientific community to target large problems of national importance. By mapping 

user requirements to a complicated set of tasks and automatic composition of workflows “behind 

the scenes”, cloud facilities can act as one-stop locations for accessing different and inter-linked 

services related to e-governance. Further, the cloud computing initiatives in various sectors can help 

avoiding replication of infrastructure at multiple locations, and thus help decrease IT expenditure by 

the government. Thus, for India to completely realize its IT and scientific potential with economically 

viable solutions, cloud computing has to be treated as one of the major thrust area, and large-scale 

national cloud computing facilities will have to be set up. 

Several segments of society can benefit because of this. Some of the obvious segments that can 

directly reap the benefits are listed below: 

Schools, Colleges & Universities: Cloud computing can help schools, colleges and universities access 

the latest technologies at an affordable price. 

New Innovative Business Firms: Start-ups and SMBs need not invest for their IT infrastructure cost. 

With the cloud services they can consume as their business grows. In fact, one can run their own 

business on the cloud with an office at home. 

Multimedia Content Providers: Multimedia digital content can be distributed to various consumers 

for a lower price. Entertainment, agriculture and meteorology, are some of the areas where 

compute clouds can provide wider reach. 

E-Governance: Many government departments have to deal with huge data and mining this data for 

useful information needs sophisticated computing infrastructure. Cloud computing resolves this 

issue effectively by enabling access to the required infrastructure. Apart from this, secured 

application services on the cloud, to such data, can allow visibility of information from anywhere and 

everywhere. Accessing information dealing with land records, demography associated like UIDAI, 

health associated, tax records, etc., are some of the areas where cloud computing can bring far 

reaching reforms. 

Cloud computing in academia has been confined to a few isolated groups. Research on computing 

has been pursued at the Indian Institute of Science both in the Computer Aided Design Laboratory 

and the Grid Applications Research Laboratory. The computer services centre of IIT Delhi provides a 

cloud for scientific and high performance computing (HPC) usage of faculty of the Institute. The 



cloud is implemented using 192 processors and virtualizes computing, storage and network 

resources. It also has provision for automatically switching off nodes during lean periods and 

switching on during demand, thereby maintaining high utilization. The faculty can request for a 

specific number of dedicated virtual resources with specific storage, operating system and duration 

requirements. A similar cloud computing cluster facility has been set up by Yahoo! in IIT Mumbai for 

research on web analytics by students and faculty. Many of these cloud computing projects cater to 

a specific community with limited set of objectives. It will be essential to have large scale national 

clouds catering to a large society for use in diverse areas and applications. The Centre for Design of 

Advanced Computing (CDAC) is also involved in cloud and grid computing research. In addition, 

proposals are currently underway to the planning commission to use cloud computing in a major 

way in the national Geographical Information Systems (GIS) by the National GIS Interim Group. 

Another initiative on high performance computing headed by Prof. N. Balakrishnan has also 

submitted a proposal to the planning commission which will use large scale cloud for high 

performance computing with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and for applications with software as 

a service (SaaS) model. 

A complete list of all Indian research groups is listed in the Appendix A. 

Appendix - A 

Indian Academic Organisations involved in Cloud Computing 

IISc-Bangalore: Dr. J. Lakshmi/Prof. S.K. Nandy http://www.serc.iisc.ernet.in/cadl/ 

IISc-Bangalore: Prof. Sathish S. Vadhiyar http://www.serc.iisc.ernet.in/garl/ 

IIT-Mumbai: Prof. Umesh Bellur http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~umesh/ 

IIT-Delhi: Dr. Sourav Bansal http://www.cse.iitd.ernet.in/~sbansal/ 

IIT-Guwahati:Dr. Diganta Goswami http://www.iitg.ernet.in/dgoswami/ 

IIIT-Hyderabad: Search and Information Extraction Lab LTRC, IIIT-Hyderabad 

http://search.iiit.ac.in/cloud-computing 

IIT-GandhiNagar; NIT Surat: Prof. Dhiren R. Patel http://www.iitgn.ac.in/faculty/comp/dhiren.htm 

Indian Research Organisations involved in Cloud Computing 

CDAC, Hyderabad and CDAC, Bangalore: http://www.cdac.in/ 

In addition, proposals are currently underway to the planning commission to use cloud computing in 

a major way in the national Geographical Information Systems (GIS) by the National GIS Interim 

Group. Another initiative on high performance computing headed by Prof. N. Balakrishnan has also 

submitted a proposal to the planning commission which will use large scale cloud for high 

performance computing with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and for applications with software as 

a service (SaaS) model. 



Indian Commercial organisations providing cloud services 

Company Service Location Remarks 

AppPoint AppsOnAzure - 

PaaS 

Bangalore Cloud based application 

infrastructure using Microsoft Azure 

as the platform. I am yet to explore 

the details. 

Clogeny Cloud Enabler Pune Cloud related services such as: 

Migration 

Deployment 

Planning 

Consulting 

CtrlS CtrlS Cloud -IaaS Hyderabad On-Demand Private Cloud. 

99.995% uptime 

Tier 4 datacenter 

EazeWork EazeHR - SaaS Noida Cloud SaaS for SMEs/SMBs. 

EazePayroll -SaaS 

EazeSales -SaaS 

NetMagic 

Solutions 

Cloud 2.0 

CloudNet 

CloudServe 

PrivateCloud 

OrangeScape OrangeScape 

Studio - PaaS 

Ozonetel 

Systems 

KooKoo – PaaS 

CTS - SaaS 

Mumbai A front runner in the 

IndianIaaS space. 

Chennai USP - Visual PaaS. 

OrangeScape CEO Interview 

OrangeScape Launches into 

US Market with Persistent 

Systems Partnership 

2011 TiE50 Software/Cloud 

Computing Winners 

Hyderabad In India it has definitely a first-mover 

advantage in cloud telephony 

services (CTS) 

PK4 Software Impel CRM -SaaS Bangalore USP – a non-western CRM for India. 

PK4 CEO Interview 

Ramco Ramco 

OnDemand -SaaS 

Chennai An early mover in SaaS. An ERP on 

the cloud. 



Remindo Remindo - SaaS Mumbai Your company branded official social 

media tool in cloud (Still in Beta, free 

– up to 20 users) 

Synage DeskAway -SaaS Mumbai Cloud based project management. 

Tata 

Communications 

InstaCompute - 

IaaS 

InstaOffice -SaaS 

Synage Founder & CEO Speaks 

The SaaS Edge by Sahil Parikh 

Mumbai Data Centers located at Hyderabad, 

Singapore 

InstaOffice is powered byGoogleApps 

TCS iON - ITaaS Mumbai Covers the entire spectrum of 

business processes for SMBs. 

Domains: 

Wolf 

Frameworks 

Bibliography 

Amazon EC2: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2 

Manufacturing 

Wellness 

Retail 

Education 

Wolf PaaS Bangalore Cloud PaaS with 99.97% SLA. 

Armbrust, e. A. (2009). Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud computing. 

http://radlab.cs.berkeley.edu/. 

Director Wolf Frameworks 

Speaks 

Breiter, G. (2010). Cloud Computing Architecture and Strategy. IBM Corporation. 

Eucalyptus: http://www.eucalyptus.com/ 

Group, C. C. (2010). Cloud Computing UseCases - White Paper version 4.0. 

Kshetri, N. (2010). Cloud computing in developing economies: Drivers, Effects and Policy Measures. 

PTC'10 Proceedings, (pp. 1-22). 

Microsoft Azure: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/ 

National Knowledge Network (NKN): http://www.nkn.in 

NetSolve: http://icl.cs.utk.edu/netsolve 

Nimbus cloud: http://www.nimbusproject.org/ 

NASA Nebula Cloud: http://www.nasa.gov/open/plan/nebula.html 

OpenCirrus: https://opencirrus.org/ 



Pallis, G. (2010, Sep.-Oct.). Cloud Computing The New Frontier of Internet Computing. IEEE Internet 

Computing, 70-73. 

Yahoo! Hadoop: http://hadoop.apache.org/ 

http://www.techno-pulse.com/2011/05/india-based-cloud-computing-companies.html

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