Cloudware Operations and Management - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 372

As introduced in the earlier chapters, the major benefits of cloud comput-
ing can be summarized as follows:
• Means to move from operating in a capital expenditure environment
to an operational expenditure environment.
• Ability to rapidly deploy innovative business and research applica-
tions in a cost-effective manner.
• Use of virtualization to detach business services from the underly-
ing execution infrastructure.
• Disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities are intrinsic
in the cloud paradigm.
• Ability of the cloud provider to apply security safeguards more
effectively and efficiently in a centralized environment.
• Ability to select among a variety of cloud vendors that provide reli-
able scalable services, metered billing, and advanced development
resources.
• Scalable infrastructure that can rapidly provision and de-allocate
substantial resources on an as-needed basis.
18.2 Core Services
18.2.1 Discovery and Replication
Service discovery promotes reusability by allowing service users to find the
existing services. RESTful services support discovery and reuse at design
time. Replication can be used to create and maintain copies of an enter-
prise's data at these sites. When events affecting an enterprise's primary
location occur, key application services can effectively be restarted and
run at the remote location incurring no capital expenditure, only opera-
tional expenditure, until such time as the primary site is brought back
online. Replication keeps all replicas as a part of one atomic transaction.
Replication technology is available in storage arrays and network-based
appliances and through host-based software.
18.2.2 Load Balancing
Load balancing prevents system bottlenecks due to unbalanced loads. It also
considers implementing failover for the continuation of a service after fail-
ure of one or more of its components. This means that a load balancer pro-
vides a mechanism by which instances of applications can be provisioned
and deprovisioned automatically without changing network configuration.