Question

+1. Define what is meant by the following cloud computing terms and describe the potential benefits for a small computing company: a) Infrastructure as a service (4 Marks) b) Platform as a service (4 Marks) c) Software as a service (4 Marks) 2. Define what is meant by the following terms a) Multimedia (2 Marks) b) Hypertext (2 Marks) c) Metadata (2 Marks) d) XML (2 Marks

Answer 1

1.

a) Infrastructure as a service: It provides access to Physical machines, Virtual machines, and Virtual Storage. It also offers virtual LAN (VLANs), IP addresses, software bundles, Load balancers, and Disk storage. It provides Pre-installed software that is used in Virtual machines. It provides a Pre-installed Operating system used in windows, Linux, Solaris. Companies that operate in an infrastructure as a service are Amazon, Google compute engine. Benefits of IaaS are:    i) We can access our Infrastructure over the globe. ii) It provides flexibility in infrastructure. iii) It stores multiple copies of data. iv) We can get the resources on-demand.    v) Availability is high. vi) It provides scalability of computing.

b) Platform as a service: It provides cloud applications platform made up of hardware, operating system, and some libraries. PaaS offers a runtime environment for applications. It basically provides a platform for developers to develop applications. It provides Browers based environment for the development of applications. It provides secured scalable web services. It has an easy workflow and approval process. It also provides easy integration with other applications. Users can easily create a web application using PaaS without installing anything in the system.       Benefits of PaaS are: i) We don't need to purchase Hardware or Software. Hence, it is cost-effective. ii) Software maintenance is the responsibility of vendors. iii) It provides less administration overhead. iv) It is easily scalable as per the need.

c) Software as a service: It offers software applications as a service to the users. Users can access directly to the cloud application without installing anything on the system. Basically, the cloud provider has some physical resource from which virtual resource is created and from the virtual resource, there are n number of software which are embedded into the cloud environment, are used by cloud client. Benefits of SaaS are: i)It is available over the internet. ii) It is easily scalable as per the need. iii) It is cost-effective. iv) It has on-demand availability. v) It provides automatic updation of software.

2.

a) Multimedia: Multimedia is a software technology that combines different media like sound, video, images, text, audio, graphics, etc either separately or in combination using computers. Multimedia is a computer-based interactive communications process.

b) Hypertext: It is a text which contains links to other text. It may refer to the plain simple text that contains links to access another link of text within the same or different document. It provides a means to organize and present information in a way that is easily accessible to the users.

c) Metadata: Metadata can be defined as data about data. We can say that Metadata is the summarized data that leads us to detailed data. It gives a catalog of data in data warehouse and pointers to this data.

d) XML: XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. It is designed to store and transport data. It provides a framework to define markup language. XML tags are not predefined. We must define our own tags. XML is a platform-independent and language-independent.