Industrial Automation Magazine India

The Journey of Cloud Computing

Published on : Saturday 11-01-2020

The Journey of Cloud Computin

Pethuru Raj Chelliah presents an overview of the humble beginning and illustrious journey of cloud computing.

Without an iota of doubt, the long-standing goal of IT optimisation is being fulfilled with the deft leverage of the compartmentalisation (virtualisation and containerisation) idea. By smartly applying the mantra of “divide and conquer”, which is ably supported by hypervisor software solutions, any physical server machine (alternatively called as bare metal – BM – servers) gets programmatically disintegrated into multiple virtual machines in order to run several heterogeneous applications together. This trend-setting transition has laid down a stimulating foundation for an enhanced utilisation of highly expensive IT resources. 

Then came a number of automated tools in order to artistically accelerate and augment various manual activities, which are commonly associated with IT operations and management. That is, a variety of IT-related tasks such as configuration management, software deployment, system administration, monitoring, modernisation and maintenance, and operational analytics got considerably simplified and streamlined through a bevy of path-breaking technologies and tools. The other noteworthy and notorious activities include process/task scheduling, workload consolidation and placement, resource utilisation and allocation, service management, energy efficiency, etc. These distinguished advancements have led to the ground-breaking concept of cloud computing, which has been evolving elegantly and expediently to meet up varying expectations of businesses and people.

Subsequently, the game-changing virtualisation concept has started to penetrate into every IT aspect and hence the buzzwords such as storage virtualisation, network virtualisation, etc., have gained both market and mine shares. That is, we started to experience software-defined cloud environments. Resultantly, the new and grandiose reality of hardware programming decisively originated with the highly matured and stabilised virtualisation method. This phenomenon of software-defined clouds is being touted as the Cloud 2.0 era. Precisely speaking, the cloudification has resulted in highly optimised and organised IT infrastructures for running business workloads and IT services with all the clarity and confidence. 

Enter Cloud-native Computing
Thus, the faster adoption and adaption of microservices architecture (MSA), containerisation, container orchestration platforms, enterprise DevOps, site reliability engineering (SRE) methods, and serverless computing have collectively led to the days of cloud-native computing, which is being pronounced as the pivotal and paramount technology for elegantly facilitating a series of digital innovations and disruptions. Digital intelligence through a litany of promising and potential artificial intelligence (AI) methods is all set to become a new normal across business verticals. Thus, cloud infrastructure in synchronisation with integrated platforms and containerisation mechanism is capable of establishing and sustaining long-anticipated business transformations.
 

Pethuru Raj Chelliah, PhD, is working as the chief architect in Digital Platform and Project Services, Reliance Jio, Bangalore. The previous stints were in IBM Cloud Centre of Excellence (CoE), Wipro Consulting Services (WCS), and Robert Bosch Corporate Research (CR). He has authored and edited 20 books thus far and focussed on some of the emerging technologies such as IoT, Cognitive Computing, Blockchain, Digital Twin, Containerised Clouds, Data Science, Microservices Architecture (MSA), fog/edge computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), etc.

Box item with photo of book cover
Essentials of Cloud Computing

There is a new book published with the title “Essentials of Cloud Computing: A Holistic Perspective” by Springer International Publishing. 

This reader-friendly textbook presents a comprehensive overview of the essential aspects of cloud computing, from the origin of the field to the latest developments. Rather than merely discussing the cloud paradigm in isolation, the text also examines how cloud computing can work collaboratively with other computing models to meet the needs of evolving computing trends. This multi-dimensional approach encompasses the challenges of fulfilling the storage requirements of big data, the use of the cloud as a remote server for Internet of Things and sensor networks, and an investigation of how cloud computing is interlinked with edge, fog and mist computing, among other illuminating perspectives.

Topics and features: includes learning objectives, motivating questions, and self-test exercises in every chapter; presents an introduction to the underlying concepts, fundamental features, and key technological foundations of cloud computing; examines how enterprise networking and cloud networking can work together to achieve business goals; reviews the different types of cloud storage available to address the evolution of data and the need for digitisation; discusses the challenges and approaches to implementing cloud security, and the hot topic of cloud management; highlights the value of cloud brokerage capabilities, and explains the importance of cloud orchestration in multi-cloud environments; describes the details of cloud migration, the crucial role of monitoring in optimising the cloud, and the basics of disaster recovery using cloud infrastructure.

This technically rigorous yet simple-to-follow textbook is an ideal resource for graduate courses on cloud computing. Professional software developers and cloud architects will also find the work to be an invaluable reference.

(Authored by Chellammal Surianarayanan and Pethuru Raj Chelliah, this book is available on Amazon site)