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Chapter 2
Cloud computing architecture,
concepts, and characteristics
Chaowei Yang and Qunying Huang
Cloud computing emerged as a result of the evolution of distributed
computing (Armbrust etal. 2010; Yang etal. 2009) and as a response to
the call for easy and fast sharing of computing resources to address chal-
lenges in the 21st century.
2.1 CONCEPTS
Accessibility to computing resources has been greatly enhanced since the
early mode of distributed computing as time sharing of mainframe infra-
structure. The sharing of mainframes can only be scheduled with a lim-
ited number of local terminals. The Internet relieves computing terminals
from collo ...