Question

discuss whether or not cloud characteristics are like cloud mechanisms and cloud architectures. Make sure, you explain why. Please provide your response in atleast 500 words.

Answer 1

Discussion about whether or not cloud characteristics are like cloud mechanisms and cloud architectures and explanation of why.
No, cloud characteristics are not like cloud mechanisms and cloud architectures.

Cloud characteristics are abstract or ideas of what and how cloud is and it is a logical thing. Some of the cloud characteristics are on-demand usage and self-service, ubiquitous (omnipresent) access, multitenancy, and resource pooling, rapid elasticity, measured service or usage, and resiliency. These five characteristics are defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). These are the five essential cloud characteristics. Cloud's other characteristics are also availability, authenticity, confidentiality, broad network access, etc.

The on-demand usage and self-service characteristic of cloud, lets a consumer to unilaterally provision computing capabilities, resources, and services, such as server time, databases, bandwidth, content distribution, and network storage, as required automatically without any human interaction with the cloud service provider. Whereas cloud architectures of cloud service provider provides this characteristic to the user to experience it by having an architecture of the IT infrastructure with all the IT resources, services, components, and sub-components in place, organized, designed, developed, and implemented in such a way, they are readily, easily, conveniently available in abundance anytime, from anywhere, and from any device. On the other hand, cloud mechanisms to the most extent are up to the cloud service provider, as to how they want this to be working, and they handle this part. The cloud service providers use technologies such as virtualization, authentication, a shared-responsibility mechanism for security, shared tenancy, and other mechanisms on cloud architectures to provide cloud characteristics to the users, customers, and client companies. Cloud service providers use different other technologies and mechanisms to make cloud mechanisms to work.

Cloud characteristics, basically, let organizations and individuals know and understand what exactly they are getting out of the cloud. Agencies or companies consider information technology implementations meeting the cloud characteristics and models.

On the other hand, cloud mechanisms are the concept or process of how cloud resources, services, components, architecture, characteristics work independently as well as together as a whole for cloud computing. Cloud computing involves mechanisms for exploring how a given pattern is applied differently through alternative combinations of mechanism implementations, standardizing proven practices and solutions in a design pattern format and also adding standardization to pattern application options. Cloud mechanisms are defined for the cloud computing design patterns catalog.

Cloud architectures, on the other hand, is both the logical, idea, or the abstract concept of how cloud is and is also physical with various components and sub-components such as storage systems, databases, software capabilities, applications, servers, networking devices and components; and is the relationship and interdependencies among them required for cloud computing. These components or sub-components consist of a front end platform such as fat client, desktop computers, laptops, thin client, mobile devices, etc; back end platforms such as servers, storage, databases, etc; a cloud-based delivery; and a network such as the Internet, Intranet, and Intercloud. Certain protocols are used to manage cloud computing architecture. The front end and the back end platforms are connected to each other for communication and data transmission and work together to provide services.

The relationship and interdependencies among cloud characteristics, mechanisms, and architectures:
Both, cloud mechanisms and architectures make use of cloud characteristics. In fact, the architectures are designed keeping in mind the characteristics, so the architectures provide solutions meeting, achieving, and offering the cloud characteristics. Even cloud mechanisms are designed, developed, and implemented to offer cloud characteristics. Both, cloud mechanisms and architectures are based on cloud characteristics.

Hence, all three of them, cloud characteristics, mechanisms, and architectures are different from one another.