Basics

This chapter reviews the following concepts: cloud computing fundamentals; roles in cloud computing; applications; demand, supply, capacity, and fungibility; and demand variability. Cloud computing is defined as a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand. Applications are composed of software components that execute on physical compute, networking, memory, and storage equipment. An application instance is an operational configuration of application software components on appropriate compute, networking, memory, and storage infrastructure elements that can offer service to users. The application instance is owned and operated by an application service provider. From an economics perspective, users offer demand and application service providers offer supply; consumption is the amount of service that users enjoy in an interval of time. User pays some price to enjoy service, and service providers must cover their costs of delivering that service.