The Methods of Cloud Computing

Abstract

Computing, storage, and network resources are available as a utility today through the methods of cloud computing. Users can provision the resources, platforms, and services they need and pay only for their usage. The key technology enabling this is virtualization, yet orchestration and automation tools, distributed application architectures and execution models, as well as higher-level platforms also define how virtual resources are offered and consumed today. At the same time, the rise of cloud computing has been accompanied by cultural shifts, where most notably software development, systems operations, and quality assurance are merging in their roles, processes, and tools. Major trends that have been shaping cloud computing recently include serverless computing, which abstracts resources and resource management entirely from consumers through a fully automatic horizontal application scaling, and the emerging computing paradigms of the Internet of Things, which integrate heterogeneous distributed resources beyond centralized data centers. Meanwhile, current research on cloud infrastructures and operations increasingly employs machine learning to automate resource management and failure handling.