Establishing the State of the Art Knowledge Domain of Cloud Computing

Cloud is an inflection point for customers to transit the burden of infrastructure and platform management to a service provider. There is virtual centralization in cloud computing. This paper provides the state of the art knowledge domain of cloud to developers and researchers. It gives a brief overview of cloud computing and how it relates with grid, cluster, distributed, parallel and GPU computing. We have surveyed different cloud deployment models and essential characteristics of cloud that are required to build cloud architecture. A state of the art study is presented that explores several cloud architectures including discussion of applications, platforms and shared infrastructure of cloud that unveils the sharing mechanism of physical services, networking capabilities and storage. Furthermore, this study covers the primary business service models for instance Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) with vendors of each layer. On the other hand some issues of clouds are also highlighted such as availability of cloud and challenges which include issues regarding security, lack of standards, privacy and location concerns. We analyze several cloud architectures on multiple performance measuring parameters such as scalability, security, cost, performance, reliability, maintenance, and mobile accessibility.