Cloud computing safety

Cloud computing is a network-based IT hosting service that first appeared when Amazon launched its Amazon Web Services (AWS) offering in 2006. Amazon's goal was to market the unused computing power of servers deployed around the world for its own use, which were only being used at 10% of their capacity, in order to cope with seasonal peaks, particularly during the holiday season.

The idea of offering IT services that are detached from the technical characteristics of their implementation, thanks to the network, had been formulated a few years earlier by researchers such as Michel Volle .

The uniqueness of cloud computing compared to traditional data hosting, website hosting, or computing server offerings is based on the following five characteristics:

• deployment and termination of on-demand services, on a self-service basis, generally via a web interface, almost instantaneously;

• broadband network access;

• pooling of non-localized resources: infrastructure, network, software, storage;

• rapid allocation and deallocation of resources (elasticity);

• billing based on consumption, typically hourly.

This flexibility is made possible by the availability of four technologies that are already well known, but whose performance has recently improved considerably:

• distributed computing;

• a ubiquitous high-speed network;

• the domain name system (DNS);

• efficient platforms for virtual machines.

A few remarks about these technologies:

• the need for a fast and ubiquitous network is obvious;

• The availability of effective virtualization systems, which are analyzed in detail in this article, makes it possible to easily deploy new servers on demand, and in some cases even automatically, whereas with physical machines, this would require a whole logistics operation involving transport, power...