Characteristics of Cloud Computing

by mheydt 25. January 2009 22:34 >
  • Self-healing / Reliability: In case of failure, cloud systems are capable of taking advantage of failover to standy systems (both CPU and storage), thereby enabling high levels of availability and reliability to applications that take advantage of these capabilities.
  • SLA-driven: The cloud is dynamically managed dynamically by service-level agreements that define policies such as delivery parameters, costs and availability.
  • Multi-tenancy: The system is built in a way that allows several customers to share infrastructure, without the customers being aware of it and without compromising the privacy and security of each customer’s data.  This also allows for low costs due to sharing of the resources.
  • Service-oriented: Cloud based systems are the epitome of loosely coupled service oriented systems, allowing the composing applications out of discrete services that are independent of each other, and also provide the inherent ability to failover to backups through redundancy.
  • Virtualized: Applications are decoupled from the underlying hardware, and dynamically allocated to available systems, freeing you from needing to worry about where an application runs, what hardware it runs on, and for maintaining the hardware over time.
  • Linearly / Incremental Scalability: Cloud environments provide the ability to allow users and systems to add additional compute resources on-demand in response to application loads.
  • Agility: Cloud system provide the basis to put quickly put together systems that can solve new problems through use of in-cloud services.
  • Virtually Unlimited and Replicated Data: Need more storage?  Just store more in the cloud.  It's the clouds providers responsibility to provide enough storage, and you only have to pay for what you use, not for what you might use.  And you never will get blocked by running out of physical storage.

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I'm a .NET, XAML, and iOS polyglot that loves playing with new things and making cool and innovative stuff.  I am also a Mac junkie.

I am Principal Technologist for SunGard Global Services in NYC, in their Advanced Technologies practice, and I work extensively with SunGard's energy and financial customers.

Note the the posting on this blog are my own and do not represent the position, strategies or opinions of SGS.

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