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What is a cloud computing portal?
Is a website that provides cloud computing.

1, narrow cloud computing

In a narrow sense, cloud computing refers to the way IT infrastructure is delivered and used, and it refers to obtaining the required resources (hardware, platform, software) in an on-demand and extensible way through the network. A network that provides resources is called a "cloud". The resources in the "cloud" can be infinitely expanded by users, and can be obtained at any time, used on demand, expanded at any time, and paid according to use. This feature is often referred to as using IT infrastructure such as water and electricity.

2. Generalized cloud computing

Cloud computing in a broad sense refers to the delivery and use of services, and refers to obtaining the required services in an on-demand and extensible way through the network. This service can be related to IT, software and Internet, or any other service.

Explanation:

This resource pool is called "Cloud". "Cloud" is some virtual computing resources that can be self-maintained and managed, usually some large server clusters, including computing servers, storage servers, broadband resources and so on. Cloud computing concentrates all computing resources, which are automatically managed by software without manual intervention. This allows application providers to focus more on their own business without worrying about complicated details, which is conducive to innovation and cost reduction.

Someone made an analogy: this is like changing from the ancient single generator mode to the centralized power supply mode of power plants. It means that computing power can also be circulated as a commodity like gas and water and electricity, which is convenient to obtain and low in cost. The biggest difference is spread through the Internet.

Cloud computing is the development of parallel computing, distributed computing and grid computing, or the commercial realization of these computer science concepts. Cloud computing is the result of mixed evolution and leap of the concepts of virtualization, utility computing, IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service).

Generally speaking, cloud computing can be regarded as a commercial evolution version of grid computing. As early as 2002, Liu Peng of China put forward the concept of computing pool [4][5] to solve the practical problem of traditional grid computing thought: "Connect high-performance computers scattered all over the country with high-speed networks, organically bind them together with specially designed middleware software, accept computing requests from scientists all over the world with Web interfaces, and distribute them to appropriate nodes for operation. Computing pool can greatly improve the quality of service and resource utilization, while avoiding the inefficiency and complexity caused by dividing applications across nodes, and can meet the actual needs under current conditions. " If the "high-performance computer" in this paper is replaced by "server cluster" and the "scientific worker" is replaced by "business user", it will be very close to the current cloud computing.

Cloud computing has the following characteristics:

(1) Very large scale. "Cloud" has a considerable scale. Google cloud computing has more than 1 10,000 servers, and Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo and other "clouds" have hundreds of thousands of servers. Enterprise private clouds generally have hundreds of servers. "Cloud" can give users unprecedented computing power.

(2) Virtualization. Cloud computing supports users to obtain application services at any place and using various terminals. The requested resources come from the "cloud" rather than a fixed tangible entity. The application runs somewhere in the cloud, but in fact, users don't need to know or worry about the specific location where the application runs. All we need is a notebook or a mobile phone, and we can achieve everything we need through network services, even such tasks as supercomputing.

(3) High reliability. "Cloud" adopts measures such as fault tolerance of multiple copies of data and isomorphic interchange of computing nodes to ensure high reliability of services. Using cloud computing is more reliable than using local computers.

(4) universality. Cloud computing is not specific to a particular application. With the support of cloud, ever-changing applications can be constructed, and the same cloud can support different applications at the same time.

(5) High scalability. The scale of the "cloud" can be dynamically expanded to meet the growing needs of applications and users.

(6) On-demand service. "Cloud" is a huge resource pool, which you can buy on demand; Clouds can be charged like tap water, electricity and gas.

(7) extremely cheap. Because the special fault-tolerant measures of "cloud" can use extremely cheap nodes to form a cloud, the automatic centralized management of "cloud" makes a large number of enterprises not have to bear the increasingly high cost of data center management. Compared with the traditional system, the universality of "cloud" greatly improves the utilization rate of resources, so users can fully enjoy the low-cost advantage of "cloud", which often costs only a few hundred yuan [url=/view/25549.htm] [/url]

Cloud computing can completely change people's future lives, but at the same time, we need to pay attention to environmental issues, so as to truly contribute to human progress, rather than simply upgrading technology.

In today's society in the era of "cloud computing", PC is still the core tool in our daily work and life-we use PC to process documents, store data, and share information with others through email or USB flash drive. If the PC hard disk is broken, we will be helpless because of data loss. In the era of "cloud computing", "cloud" will do storage and calculation for us. "Cloud" is a computer cluster, and each cluster includes thousands or even millions of computers. The advantage of "cloud" is that the computer inside can be updated at any time, ensuring that "cloud" will last forever. Google has several such "clouds", and other IT giants such as Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon also have or are building such "clouds". At that time, we only needed a computer with Internet access, and we didn't need to care about which "cloud" the storage or calculation took place, but once needed, we could use any equipment, such as computers and mobile phones, to quickly calculate and find these materials anywhere. We don't have to worry about data loss anymore.

After Gu joined Google, she found that this concept has been put into practice. Google's technology can make hundreds of thousands of computers work together to form a powerful data center. In an exclusive interview with Caijing, Kai-Fu Lee, CEO of Google China, said that Google's real competitiveness lies in the existence of these "clouds", which give Google unparalleled ability to store and calculate global data. When Google was founded, it did not deliberately pursue the concepts of "cloud computing" and "grid computing". But as a search engine, Google needs these "clouds" objectively. In fact, Yahoo's search also uses "cloud computing". Cloud computing is a new way to enjoy infrastructure, which can connect a huge system pool and provide various IT services. Many factors have driven the demand for this environment, including the adoption of connected devices, real-time data streaming, the rapid growth of SOA and Web 2.0 applications, such as search, open collaboration, social networking and mobile commerce. In addition, the improvement of digital component performance has greatly increased the scale of IT environment, thus further strengthening the demand for unified cloud management.

Cloud computing+always-on devices were rated as "the top ten most influential IT technology combinations in the past 25 years"

The New York Times: What exactly does cloud computing mean?

Cloud computing is becoming popular, and Ben Pring, a senior analyst at Gartner, commented: "It is becoming a buzzword." However, the problem is that everyone seems to have a different understanding of cloud computing. As a metaphor for the Internet, "cloud" is easy to understand. But once it is associated with "calculation", its meaning expands and begins to blur. Some analysts and companies just define cloud computing as an upgraded version of computing-basically many virtual servers provided on the Internet. Others have a broader definition of cloud computing. They think that everything users consume outside the firewall is in the "cloud".

The reason why cloud computing attracts people's attention is that after people consider what the IT industry really needs, they need to find a way to increase the capacity and capacity of the Internet without increasing new investment, new manpower and new software. And cloud computing just provides this possibility. Nowadays, cloud computing is in its infancy, and companies of all sizes provide various cloud computing services, from software applications to network storage to email filtering. Some of these companies are infrastructure providers, while others are SAAS (Software as a Service) providers, such as Salesforce.com. Nowadays, personal services based on the Internet are mainly realized, but the aggregation and integration of cloud computing are on the rise.

Several forms of cloud computing InfoWorld discussed several forms of cloud computing with dozens of companies, analysts and IT users:

1.SAAS (Software as a Service)

This type of cloud computing delivers programs to thousands of users through browsers. In the eyes of users, this will save the cost of server and software authorization; From the supplier's point of view, it is enough to maintain only one program, which can reduce the cost. Salesforce.com is the most famous company in this kind of service. SAAS is usually used for human resource management programs and ERP. Google Apps and Zoho Office are similar services.

2. utility computing

This idea has a long history, but it has only recently sprung up in Amazon.com, Sun, IBM and other companies that provide storage services and virtual servers. This kind of cloud computing is to build a virtual data center for IT industry, so that it can concentrate memory, I/O devices, storage and computing power into a virtual resource pool to provide services for the whole network.

3. Network services

Closely related to SAAS, Internet service providers can provide APIs to enable developers to develop more Internet-based applications instead of providing independent programs.

4. Platform as a Service

Another SAAS, this form of cloud computing provides a development environment as a service. You can use the equipment of middlemen to develop your own programs and send them to users through the Internet and its servers.

5. Manage service providers

One of the oldest applications of cloud computing. This kind of application is more oriented to IT industry than end users, and is often used for email virus scanning, program monitoring and so on.

6. Business service platform

The mixed application of SAAS and MSP, this kind of cloud computing provides a platform for the interaction between users and providers. For example, the user's personal expenditure management system can manage the user's expenditure and coordinate the various services he ordered according to the user's settings.

7. Internet integration

Integrate companies that provide similar services on the Internet to make it easier for users to compare and choose their own service providers.

Four remarkable characteristics of cloud computing: 1. Cloud computing provides the most reliable and secure data storage center, and users no longer have to worry about data loss and virus invasion.

Many people think that data is the safest only if it is stored in a computer that they can see and touch, but it is not. Your computer may be damaged by carelessness, or it may be attacked by a virus, so that the data on the hard disk cannot be recovered, and criminals who have access to your computer may take advantage of various opportunities to steal your data. Isn't the sensational "Yanzhaomen" incident a report that personal data was leaked because the computer was sent for repair?

On the other hand, when your documents are stored in a network service such as Google Docs, and when you upload photos to a network album such as Google Picasa Web, you will no longer have to worry about data loss or damage. Because at the other end of the cloud, there is the most professional team in the world to help you manage information, and there is the most advanced data center in the world to help you save data. At the same time, strict rights management policies can help you share data with the people you specify with confidence. In this way, you can enjoy the best and safest service without spending money, even more convenient than saving money in the bank.

Secondly, cloud computing has the lowest requirements for client devices and is the most convenient to use.

Everyone has had the experience of maintaining a wide variety of applications on personal computers. In order to use the latest operating system or the latest version of software, we must constantly upgrade our computer hardware. In order to open a document in a certain format sent by a friend, we have to frantically search and download an application software.

In order to prevent the introduction of viruses when downloading, we have to repeatedly install anti-virus and firewall software. All these troubles add up to a nightmare for a novice who has just come into contact with computers and networks! If you can't stand this computer experience any longer, cloud computing may be your best choice. As long as you have a computer with Internet access and a browser that you like, all you have to do is enter the URL in the browser and enjoy the infinite fun brought by cloud computing.

You can edit the documents stored at the other end of the cloud directly in the browser, and you can share information with your friends at any time, without worrying about whether your software is the latest version or whether your software or documents are infected with viruses. Because at the other end of the "cloud", there are professional IT personnel to help you maintain your hardware, help you install upgraded software, help you guard against viruses and various network attacks, and help you do everything you used to do on your personal computer.

In addition, cloud computing can easily share data and applications between different devices.

You may want to recall how your own contact information is saved. The most common situation is that your mobile phone stores the phone numbers of hundreds of contacts, and your personal computer or laptop stores hundreds of email addresses. In order to send e-mail when you are on a business trip, you must synchronize your contact information between your personal computer and your laptop regularly. After buying a new mobile phone, you have to synchronize the phone numbers of the old and new mobile phones.

Oh, and your PDA and your office computer. Considering the diversity and complexity of data synchronization methods of different devices, you must spend countless hours and energy to save and maintain the latest contact information between these different devices. At this time, you need to use cloud computing to make everything easier. In the network application mode of cloud computing, there is only one copy of data, which is stored at the other end of the cloud. As long as you are connected to the Internet, all your electronic devices can access and use the same data at the same time.

Still taking the management of contact information as an example, when you use network services to manage the information of all contacts, you can find a friend's email address anywhere with any computer, dial a friend's phone number directly on any mobile phone, and quickly share a contact's electronic business card with several friends. Of course, all this is done under strict security management mechanism, and only those who have access to the data can use or share these data with others.

Finally, cloud computing provides us with almost unlimited possibilities to use the network.

It provides almost infinite space for storing and managing data, and also provides almost infinite powerful computing power for us to complete various applications. Imagine that when you travel by car, you can directly see the satellite map and real-time traffic conditions in your area through your mobile phone connection network, you can quickly query your preset driving route, you can ask friends on the network to recommend the best scenic spots and restaurants nearby, you can quickly book hotels at your destination, and you can also share photos or video clips you just took with friends and relatives far away. ...

Without cloud computing, we can't enjoy these conveniences just by using client applications on personal computers or mobile phones. Personal computers or other electronic devices cannot provide unlimited storage space and computing power, but at the other end of the "cloud", a huge cluster consisting of thousands, tens of thousands or even more servers can easily do this. The capabilities of individuals and single devices are limited, but the potential of cloud computing is almost unlimited. When you put the most commonly used data and the most important functions on the "cloud", we believe that your understanding of computers, application software and even the network will change dramatically, and your life will also change accordingly.

The spiritual essence of the Internet is freedom, equality and sharing. Cloud computing, as a computing mode that best embodies the spirit of the Internet, will show great vitality in the near future and will change our work and life in many aspects. No matter ordinary network users, enterprise employees, IT managers or software developers, they can experience this change personally.

The development status of cloud computing Cloud computing is a hot new term. Because it is the result of the mixed evolution of various technologies, it has a high maturity and is promoted by large companies, and it has developed extremely rapidly. Big companies such as Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo are pioneers of cloud computing. Many successful companies in the field of cloud computing also include Salesforce, Facebook, Youtube, Myspace and so on.

Amazon uses Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) to provide computing and storage services for enterprises. Charged services include storage server, bandwidth, CPU resources and monthly fee. The monthly fee is similar to the telephone monthly fee. Storage server and bandwidth are charged by capacity, and CPU is charged by running time (hours). It didn't take Amazon long to turn cloud computing into a big business: in less than two years, there were 440,000 registered developers and a large number of enterprise users on Amazon. According to data provided by third-party statistical agencies, Amazon's business income related to cloud computing has reached $654.38 billion. Cloud computing is one of Amazon's fastest growing businesses.

Google is the biggest user of cloud computing. Google search engine is based on the support of more than 6,543,800 servers distributed in more than 200 locations, and the number of these facilities is still growing rapidly. Google earth, maps, Gmail, documents, etc. These infrastructures are also used. Using applications such as Google Docs, user data will be stored somewhere on the Internet and can be easily accessed by any system connected to the Internet. At present, Google has allowed third parties to run large-scale parallel applications through Google App Engine in Google's cloud computing. To Google's credit, it is not conservative. It has published its three magic weapons of cloud computing in the form of academic papers: GFS, MapReduce and BigTable, and has opened courses on how to program cloud computing in universities such as the United States and China.

On June 5438+065438+ 10, 2007, IBM launched the "Yun Lan" computing platform, which changed the rules of the game and brought customers a cloud computing platform that can be used at any time. It includes a series of automated, self-managing and self-repairing virtualized cloud computing software, which enables applications from all over the world to access distributed large server pools. So that the data center can run computing in an environment similar to the Internet. IBM is cooperating with 17 European organization to carry out cloud computing projects. The European Union provided 654.38+700 million euros as part of the funds. The program is called Reservoir and its slogan is "Virtualization of barrier-free resources and services". In August 2008, IBM announced that it would invest about $400 million to renovate its cloud computing data centers in North Carolina and Tokyo, Japan. IBM plans to invest $300 million in 13 cloud computing centers in 10 countries in 2009.

Following the pace of cloud computing, Microsoft launched the WindowsAzure operating system in June 2008. Azure (translated as "blue sky") is another subversive transformation of Microsoft after Windows replaced DOS. By building a new cloud computing platform on the Internet architecture, Windows has really extended from PC to "blue sky". Microsoft has hundreds of millions of Windows users' desktops and browsers around the world, and now it connects them to the "blue sky". The bottom layer of Azure is Microsoft Global Basic Service System, which consists of the fourth generation data centers all over the world.

The novelty of cloud computing is that it can provide almost unlimited cheap storage and computing power. Animoto, a start-up company in new york, has proved the power of cloud computing (this case is quoted from the report of The New York Times compiled by Hexun.com on May 25th, 2008 [URL =/view/408955. htm][/URL]). Animoto allows users to upload pictures and music, automatically generate web-based video speeches and share them with friends. The website currently provides free services to registered users. At the beginning of 2008, the number of users of this website was about 5,000 per day. In mid-April, as Facebook users began to use Animoto service, the number of users of the website surged to 750,000 in three days. Stevie Clifton, co-founder of Animoto, said that in order to meet the increasing demand of users, the company needs to increase the server capacity by 100 times, but the website has neither the funds nor the ability to build such a huge computing power. Therefore, the website cooperates with cloud computing service company RightScale to design applications that can be used in Amazon's cloud. Through this measure, the website has greatly improved its computing power, and the cost is only 10 cents per server per hour. This approach also strengthens the flexibility of start-ups when demand drops. Animoto can reduce server expenses by only reducing the number of servers used.

In China, the development of cloud computing is also very rapid. On May 2008 10, the first cloud computing center in China, which was established by IBM in Taihu New Town Science and Education Industrial Park in Wuxi, China, was put into operation (troublesome project? )。 On June 24th, 2008, IBM established the second cloud computing center in China-IBM Greater China Cloud Computing Center in Beijing IBM China Innovation Center. In 2008,165438+1October 28th, Guangdong Electronics Industry Research Institute signed a contract with Dongguan Songshan Lake Science and Technology Industrial Park Management Committee, and Guangdong Electronics Industry Research Institute will invest 200 million yuan to build a cloud computing platform in Dongguan Songshan Lake. June 30, 2008 65438+February 30, 2008, Alibaba Software, a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, officially signed a strategic cooperation framework agreement with the Nanjing Municipal Government of Jiangsu Province in 2009, and plans to establish the first "e-commerce cloud computing center" in Nanjing in early 2009, with the initial investment reaching 1 100 million yuan; 2 1 Century Internet has launched the CloudEx product line, including the complete Internet hosting service "CloudEx Computing Service", the online storage virtualization-based "CloudEx Storage Service", and the data security service for individuals and enterprises to perform Internet cloud backup, etc. China Mobile Research Institute started its exploration of cloud computing earlier, and has completed the experiment of cloud computing center. Wang Jianzhou, Chairman and CEO of China Mobile, believes that cloud computing and Internet mobility are the future development directions.

The concept of "cloud security" created by enterprises in China is unique in the field of international cloud computing. Cloud security monitors the abnormal behavior of software in the network through a large number of mesh clients, obtains the latest information of Trojans and malicious programs in the Internet, pushes them to the server for automatic analysis and processing, and then distributes the solutions of viruses and Trojans to all clients. The strategic concept of cloud security is that the more users there are, the safer each user will be, because such a huge user base is enough to cover every corner of the Internet. As long as a website is hanged or a new Trojan virus appears, it will be blocked immediately. The development of cloud security is like a gust of wind. Rising, Trend, Kaspersky, McAfee, Symantec, Jiang Min Science and Technology, Panda, Jinshan, 360 Security Guard and Kaka Internet Security Assistant all launched cloud security solutions. Rising's new product based on cloud security strategy in 2009 intercepted millions of Trojan attacks every day, including 7.65 million attacks on June 5438+1October 8. Trend Micro Cloud Security has established five data centers and tens of thousands of online servers around the world. It is reported that cloud security can support an average of 5.5 billion clicks and queries every day, and collect and analyze 250 million samples every day. The first hit rate of the database can reach 99%. With cloud security, Trend Micro now blocks as many as100000 virus infections every day.

It is worth mentioning that the core idea of cloud security is very close to the anti-spam [URL =/view/10755.htm] grid [/URL] put forward by Liu Peng as early as 2003 [2]. At that time, Liu Peng thought that spam was so rampant that it could not be automatically filtered by technical means because the artificial intelligence method relied on was not a mature technology. The biggest feature of spam is that it will send the same content to millions of recipients. Therefore, a distributed statistical and learning platform can be established to filter spam through collaborative computing of large-scale users. First, users install a client and calculate a unique "fingerprint" for each email they receive. By comparing "fingerprints", the number of copies of similar emails can be counted, and when the number of copies reaches a certain number, it can be judged that the email is spam; Secondly, because many computers on the Internet have more information than one computer, distributed Bayesian learning algorithm can realize collaborative learning process on hundreds of client computers, and collect, analyze and enjoy the latest information. Anti-spam grid embodies the real grid idea. Every user who joins the system is not only the object of service, but also the information node that completes the distributed statistical function. With the continuous expansion of the system scale, the accuracy of the system filtering spam will also improve. Using large-scale statistical methods to filter spam is more mature than using artificial intelligence methods, and it is not easy to have false positives, which is very practical. Anti-spam grid is to build a "Skynet" to intercept spam by using the cooperative work of millions of hosts in distributed Internet. After the idea of anti-spam grid was put forward, it was selected as an excellent grid project by the international conference of IEEE Cluster 2003 and made a live demonstration in Hong Kong. It also made a special report and a live demonstration at the International Symposium on Grid Computing in 2004, which attracted widespread attention and attracted the attention of Ding Lei, the founder of Netease, the largest mail service provider in China. Since spam can be handled in this way, so can virus Trojans, which is not far from the idea of cloud security.

On June 25th, 2008, 165438+ China Institute of Electronics established an expert committee on cloud computing, and appointed China Academy of Engineering academician [url=/view/ 1245508.htm] Li Deyi [/url] as its chairman. Ye Tianzheng, Chief Technology President of IBM Greater China, Liu Aimin, Director of the 15th Research Institute of China Electronics Technology Group, Zhang Yaoxue, Academician of China Academy of Engineering, Kai-fu Lee, Global Vice President of Google/President of China, Ni Guangnan, Academician of China Academy of Engineering, Huang Xiaoqing, Dean of China Mobile Communication Research Institute, etc. were appointed as deputy directors, and more than 30 well-known experts and scholars at home and abroad were appointed as members of the expert committee. On May 22nd, 2009, China Institute of Electronics will hold the first China Cloud Computing Conference at China World Hotel.