Cloud Computing

Cloud Technology Researcher José Luis Vázquez-Poletti on data storage in computing clouds, creating new virtual resources, and the costs of using computing clouds

videos | October 18, 2016

What is radically new about the idea of storing data in a cloud? What is the main application of cloud computing to real-life problems? What should we take into account while using cloud computing? These and other questions are answered by Assistant Professor in Computer Architecture and Cloud Technology Researcher José Luis Vázquez-Poletti.

With cloud computing resources are used only when needed. This is a good point because we will be switching off a specific physical machine when we don’t need to place, for instance, virtual machines there. So, we are not wasting electricity or even manpower there. The idea here is that we are assigning physical resources to virtual resources.

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We have different cloud types, now that we know the different layers. How do we define the different types of clouds that we can find in the ecosystem? Well, you just need to make a general question: who pays the bills? If it’s your institution that is maintaining physical resources, then you have a private cloud. You have your physical resources and you are assigning them to your virtual resources. And you are assigning them in the way you want. Then we have another way of seeing this: who pays the bill now? Well, I’m not paying the bills for electricity, I’m not paying the bills for renting the place where I have my physical computers. What we have here is a public cloud. In a public cloud the user is paying only for what they are using.

Real-life applications are being benefited by cloud computing. But – there is always a “but” – when you get a solution, great solutions come with great problems. We have a provision model that allows us to get as many computational resources as we need for our project, for our application. The problem here will be: how many of these resources? Which types of these resources? And when we are talking about optimality, optimality by means of what? Execution time? Throughput? Which is a number of tasks per unit of time, or cost?