A Cost-Effective Cloud Strategy for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)

Author(s):  
Debashis Saha

In cloud service provisioning, spot instances are an attractive option for IT managers of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that usually have sporadic requirements for cloud resources. Though priced dynamically, spot instances are usually cheaper. Cloud service providers (CSPs) employ the spot instance approach to sell their “idle” resources because spot instances are spare slots requiring no pre-booking, unlike reserved or on-demand instances that require prior booking. However, IT managers have to win spot instances via auctions conducted by CSPs. An SME continues to consume spot instances as long as its bid exceeds the current spot price. But, if it loses at any point in time, the unfinished task is to be put on hold by checkpoint mechanism. Optimizing both bid price and checkpoint overhead calls for strategic thinking on the part of the SME. This chapter dwells on this issue to help the IT managers of SMEs transform their business with cloud.

Author(s):  
Debashis Saha

In cloud service provisioning, spot instances are spare slots for which it has no pre-booking, unlike reserved or on-demand instances for which a cloud service provider (CSP) has a priori booking. CSPs like Amazon prefer spot instance approach to sell their “idle” computing resources as and when these idle slots appear. Though they price the spot instances dynamically depending on supply-demand status, usually the spots instances are relatively cheap. Hence, Amazon's spot instances are an attractive option for IT managers in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that normally have sporadic requirements for resources. However, SMEs have to win their desired spot instances through the auction mechanism conducted by Amazon. Since the IT manager always looks for finishing her job quickly within some specified budget, finding how to bid for spot instances in order to stay within its limited budget is a challenging task for her. She may continue to consume spot instances as long as her bid exceeds the current spot price. But, if she loses at any point, the unfinished task must be put on hold by some checkpointing mechanism so that the task may resume from the same point when she wins the spot next time. Using simulations for a very popular cloud, namely Amazon EC2, it has been found that, at a lower bid price, OPTIMAL checkpointing leads to a total cost higher than the total HOURLY checkpointing cost on a much higher bid value. Therefore, SMEs should go for higher bid prices when using OPTIMAL checkpointing and lower bid prices with HOURLY checkpointing. In the process, the author has observed some interesting correlation among checkpoint strategy, task reliability and completion time, which is reported here.


Symmetry ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 317
Author(s):  
Chithambaramani Ramalingam ◽  
Prakash Mohan

The increasing demand for cloud computing has shifted business toward a huge demand for cloud services, which offer platform, software, and infrastructure for the day-to-day use of cloud consumers. Numerous new cloud service providers have been introduced to the market with unique features that assist service developers collaborate and migrate services among multiple cloud service providers to address the varying requirements of cloud consumers. Many interfaces and proprietary application programming interfaces (API) are available for migration and collaboration services among cloud providers, but lack standardization efforts. The target of the research work was to summarize the issues involved in semantic cloud portability and interoperability in the multi-cloud environment and define the standardization effort imminently needed for migrating and collaborating services in the multi-cloud environment.


IEEE Access ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 203591-203618
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Tricomi ◽  
Giovanni Merlino ◽  
Alfonso Panarello ◽  
Antonio Puliafito

Author(s):  
Nitin Vishnu Choudhari ◽  
Dr. Ashish B Sasankar

Abstract –Today Security issue is the topmost problem in the cloud computing environment. It leads to serious discomfort to the Governance and end-users. Numerous security solutions and policies are available however practically ineffective in use. Most of the security solutions are centered towards cloud technology and cloud service providers only and no consideration has been given to the Network, accessing, and device securities at the end-user level. The discomfort at the end-user level was left untreated. The security of the various public, private networks, variety of devices used by end-users, accessibility, and capacity of end-users is left untreated. This leads towards the strong need for the possible modification of the security architecture for data security at all levels and secured service delivery. This leads towards the strong need for the possible adaption of modified security measures and provisions, which shall provide secured hosting and service delivery at all levels and reduce the security gap between the cloud service providers and end-users. This paper investigates the study and analyze the security architecture in the Cloud environment of Govt. of India and suggest the modifications in the security architecture as per the changing scenario and to fulfill the future needs for the secured service delivery from central up to the end-user level. Keywords: Cloud Security, Security in GI Cloud, Cloud Security measures, Security Assessment in GI Cloud, Proposed Security for GI cloud


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