Trustworthy Cloud Computing

CHAPTER 2PLATFORMS OF CLOUD COMPUTING

2.1 A VARIETY OF CLOUD PLATFORMS: THE FIRST IMPRESSION

The leading cloud providers – Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, HP, and so on – enable a really overwhelming variety of cloud platforms and services. Let us consider some of them at a glance as “first impression,” which is very important for a cloud user, since a good first impression is a major part of the trustworthiness intuition of a cloud platform.

Microsoft Azure cloud [53, 54] is quite familiar to me since 2011 and I have been tracking its progress for 4 years. Microsoft, as its cloud provider, offers a free 1 month cloud trial for everybody, and can provide as a grant a longer free cloud access – 1 year for a university course educator on cloud computing, and one semester for the course students. The Azure cloud offers a comfortable and reliable cloud management portal, which allows the user to create Web sites, virtual machines, cloud services, mobile services, virtual networks, active directories, cloud databases, and many other things using a unified-style self-evident user interface. A good-quality help is provided. The cloud user is authenticated using a single login and password for all kinds of cloud services. The cloud offers IaaS, PaaS, NaaS, and some other new kinds of cloud servicing, for example, machine learning in the cloud. The current version of the cloud works reliably, comfortably, and fast enough. More details of this are given in Chapter 5.

The first ...