In the last 20 years, computer network technologies have seen tremendous advancements and changes. Following the introduction of the Internet (the most popular computer network today), computer networking has resulted in several novel technological advances such as Distributed Computing and Cloud Computing. The terms distributed systems and cloud computing systems are slightly different, but the underlying concept is the same. One must first understand distributed systems and how they differ from traditional centralized computing systems to comprehend cloud computing systems.
Let’s look at the critical distinctions between Cloud Computing and Distributed Computing.
Today, most businesses employ Cloud computing services, either directly or indirectly. For example, when we utilize Amazon or Google services, we now store data in the Cloud. Because Twitter keeps all of our tweets in the Cloud, we indirectly use cloud computing services. Because there was a need for better computer networking to process data quicker, distributed and cloud computing evolved as revolutionary computing technologies.
The Need for Distributed Computing:
Centralized Computing Systems, for example, IBM Mainframes, have been used in technological computations for decades. One central computer controls all peripherals and performs complex computations in centralized Computing. However, centralized computing systems were inefficient and costly when processing massive amounts of transactional data and providing support to thousands of online users simultaneously. This paved the way for Cloud and Distributed Computing commercializing parallel processing technology.
What exactly is Distributed Computing?
Tanenbaum and Van Steen, editors of the book “Distributed Systems-Principles and Paradigm,” define Distributed Computing as “a collection of independent computers that appears to its users as a single coherent system.”
Distributed Computing uses a distributed system to solve a single significant problem by breaking it down into several tasks, each computed in the distributed system’s individual computers. A distributed system comprises multiple self-directed computers that communicate via a network. By utilizing their local memory, all computers connected in a network communicate with one another to achieve a common goal.
On the other hand, different computer users may have additional requirements, and distributed systems will address the coordination of shared resources by assisting them in communicating with other nodes to complete their tasks.
Toleration mechanisms are generally in place in the event of individual computer failures. However, the system’s cardinality, topology, and overall structure are unknown in advance, and everything is dynamic.
Examples of Distributed Computing Systems
Distributed Computing Systems appear to an average user as a single system, whereas internally distributed systems are connected to several nodes that perform the designated computing tasks. Consider the Google web server from the perspective of a user. When users submit a search query, they believe that the Google web server is a single system to which they must log in and search for the required term.
A Distributed Computing technology occurs in which Google develops several servers and distributes them in various geographical locations to provide search results in seconds or milliseconds.
Advantages of Distributed Computing:
1) Distributed computing systems offer a better price/performance ratio than centralized computers because adding microprocessors is less expensive than mainframes.
2) In terms of computational power, distributed computing systems outperform centralized (mainframe) computing systems. Distributed Computing Systems enable organizations to add software and compute power as needed, allowing for incremental growth.
Computing in the Cloud:
Users will abandon you if the application freezes or slows down in a world of fierce competition. As a result, the downtime must be close to zero. For users, regardless of whether they are in California, Japan, New York, or England, the application must be available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Mainframes cannot scale up to meet mission-critical business requirements, such as processing massive structured and unstructured datasets. This paved the way for Cloud Distributed Computing technology, allowing business processes to perform critical functions on large datasets.
Facebook has approximately 757 million active daily users, with 2 million photos viewed every second, over 3 billion photos uploaded each month, and over one million websites using Facebook Connect, with 50 million operations per second. Distributed Computing Systems cannot provide such high availability, failure resistance, and scalability on their own. Thus, Cloud computing, or Cloud Distributed Computing, is the answer to today’s computing challenges.
What exactly is Cloud Computing?
“Cloud Computing is a major technology trending that has permeated the market over the last two years,” said David Cearley, VP of Gartner. It lays the groundwork for a new IT approach that allows individuals and businesses to choose how they will acquire or deliver IT services, with less emphasis on the constraints of traditional software and hardware licencing models.”
Cloud Computing is a computing style in which users receive massively scalable and flexible IT-related capabilities as a service via Internet technologies. Services may include infrastructure, platform, applications, and storage space. Users pay for the services and resources they use. They are not required to construct their infrastructure.
“Cloud computing enables companies to consume computing resources as a utility — just like electricity — rather than having to build and maintain computing infrastructures in-house,” according to Tech Target.
Cloud Computing typically refers to the delivery of service over the Internet. This service can be anything from web-accessible business software to off-site storage or computing resources. In contrast, distributed Computing means splitting a significant problem so that a group of computers can work on it at the same time.
Cloud Computing examples
- YouTube, which hosts millions of user-uploaded video files, is the best example of cloud storage.
- Picasa and Flickr host millions of digital photographs, allowing users to create online photo albums by uploading images to their servers.
- Another excellent example of cloud computing is Google Docs, which allows users to upload presentations, word documents, and spreadsheets to their data servers. Google Docs allows users to edit and publish files for others to read and edit.
The Advantages of Cloud Computing:
1) According to one study, 42 per cent of working millennials would be willing to compromise on salary if they could telecommute, and they would be content with a 6 per cent pay cut on average. Cloud Computing allows you to globalize your workforce at a low cost because people worldwide can access your Cloud if they have access to the Internet.
2) According to one study, 73% of knowledge workers collaborate in different locations and time zones. If a company does not use cloud computing, employees must share files via email, and a single file may have multiple names and formats. Companies can provide better document control to their knowledge workers with the innovation of cloud computing services by centralizing the file and having everyone work on that single central copy of the file with increased efficiency.
Frost & Sullivan conducted a survey and discovered that businesses that use cloud computing services for increased collaboration generate a 400 per cent ROI. “The cloud has enabled us to be more efficient, try out new experiments at a meagre cost, and grow the site dramatically while maintaining a tiny team,” said Ryan Park, Operations Engineer at Pinterest.
Objectives of Cloud Computing and Distributed Computing:
Distributed Computing aims to connect users and resources to provide collaborative resource sharing. Distributed Computing strives for administrative scalability (number of domains managed), size scalability (number of processes and users), and geographical scalability (maximum distance between the nodes in the distributed system).
Cloud computing delivers services or applications on demand while aiming for increased scalability, transparency, security, monitoring, and management.
Services are delivered transparently in Cloud Computing systems, regardless of the physical implementation within the Cloud.
Types of Cloud Computing and Distributed Computing:
There are three types of Distributed Computing:
Distributed Information Systems:
The primary goal of these systems is to distribute information across multiple servers using different communication models such as RMI and RPC.
Pervasive Distributed Systems:
These distributed systems comprise embedded computing devices such as portable ECG monitors, wireless cameras, PDAs, sensors, and mobile devices. Unlike more “traditional” distributed systems, distributed pervasive systems are distinguished by their instability.
Services are delivered transparently in cloud computing systems, regardless of the physical implementation within the Cloud.
- Distributed Computing Systems:
In these systems, computers connected by a network communicate via message passing to keep track of their actions.
Services are delivered transparently in cloud computing systems, regardless of the physical implementation within the Cloud.
Cloud computing is divided into four distinct types:
Private Cloud:
Cloud infrastructure is dedicated to a specific IT organization to host applications and allow it complete control over the data without fear of security breach.
Public Cloud:
It is hosted by service providers and made available to the public. Customers have no control or visibility over this type of Cloud infrastructure. For example, Google and Microsoft own and operate their public cloud infrastructure, which they make available to the public via the Internet.
Community Cloud:
A multi-tenant cloud infrastructure shared by multiple IT organizations.
Hybrid Cloud:
A combination of two or more clouds mentioned above (Private, Public, and Community) forms the Hybrid cloud infrastructure, in which each Cloud remains a separate entity. Still, all clouds are combined to provide the benefit of multiple deployment models.
Personalities of Cloud Computing and Distributed Computing:
A task is distributed amongst different computers in Distributed Computing for computational functions to be performed concurrently using Remote Method Invocations or Remote Procedure Calls. In contrast, an on-demand network model in Cloud Computing systems is used to provide access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources.
Distributed cloud computing has become the IT buzzword, with vendors and analysts agreeing that the technology is gaining traction in the minds of customers and service providers.
Distributed Cloud Computing services are poised to assist businesses in becoming more responsive to market conditions while reducing IT costs. Cloud computing has created a story that will be “Continued,” with 2015 being a pivotal year for cloud computing services to mature.
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