Article Preview
TopIntroduction
Cloud computing is one of the extravagant technical inventions of the 21st century, which gives the facility to access data, applications, storage, and other cloud services from any worldwide location at any time through the internet. Due to its various characteristics, service, and deployment models, it is one of the promising, cost-saving, reliable, scalable, and flexible technologies available for the growth of small and medium businesses, new startups, and an individual. The invention of cloud computing was not a sudden event, but it took almost 50 years and the participation of various technologies. It started in the 1950s with the introduction of distributed computing and revolutionized with the invention of the internet in 1969 (Namasudra, 2018). In 1970, IBM introduced its first virtual machine (Namasudra, 2018), which became the heart of cloud computing. Until 1990, the internet became very popular and enriched LAN bandwidth. In 1999, the establishment of salesforce.com was considered the most significant achievement in the evolution of cloud computing. Salesforce.com started to provide the services via the internet to the end-users. Many companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft followed salesforce.com and began to offer many services simultaneously using the virtualization concepts. After the invention of web 2.0, there was a boom in social networking and the internet of things which lead to the exponential growth of virtualized services. Later, the partnership between Google and IBM makes cloud computing widely known and famous. Today, many new technologies, fog computing, edge computing, IoT, and various new artificial intelligence applications, help cloud computing provide more accessible and effective services.
As per IDC (Villars et al., 2020), the cloud computing market will be worth $1 trillion, with a double-digit compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.7 percent by 2024. According to R.L. Villars, Worldwide Research, IDC, “Cloud in all its permutations — hardware/software/services/as a service as well as public/private/hybrid/multi/edge — will play ever greater, and even dominant, roles across the IT industry for the foreseeable future.” GARTNER (Katie & Rimol, 2021) report has declared global cloud computing investment increased by 23.1 percent from $270 billion in 2020 to $332.3 billion in 2021, which is anticipated to increase to 19.6 percent by the end of 2022. Among the various cloud service models, SaaS is expected to grow by 41.4%, PaaS will grow by 54.3%, and IaaS will grow by 80.3% in 2022 compared to 2020.
It is evident from these facts that cloud computing has become an indispensable component of the digital world to provide services. On the other hand, cloud computing is growing at an incredible pace, requiring a state-of-the-art survey of general concepts and aspects of cloud computing. This paper presents a complete architectural tutorial on cloud computing, tools, allied technologies, virtualization, and trending issues.
The Motivations of This Work Are as Follows
- 1.
The new technologies Fog Computing, Edge Computing, and IoT are not themselves sufficient because somewhere, they lag in terms of storage, security, performance, and computation power which can be fulfilled with the help of cloud computing. Therefore, a detailed explanation of the combination of these trending technologies with cloud computing is given.
- 2.
Virtualization is the heart of cloud computing, but VM-based virtualization is an old concept with many disadvantages. Therefore, there was always the need for efficient, continuous delivery and cost-saving model, which led to the development of containers. The containers are cheaper, faster, and lightweight. However, there also exist many issues with them. These issues are also discussed in detail.
- 3.
Cloud computing is a very vast field; therefore, when a new researcher enters this field doesn’t know which way to go. This paper provides a comprehensive tutorial and discusses various open research challenges of cloud computing and allied technologies, encouraging them to work in future research directions.