Emerging Trends (Cloud & Blockchain Technology)

in this post, we discuss Cloud & Blockchain Technology. so let's get started...

CLOUD COMPUTING

Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, delivering shared resources, software, and data to computers and other devices on-demand, like the electricity grid. A basic definition of cloud computing is the use of the Internet for the tasks you execute on your computer for storage, recovery, and access. The "cloud" represents the Internet. Cloud computing is a new name for an old idea: the delivery of computing services from a remote location. Cloud computing services are provided via a network, usually the Internet.

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing describes the act of storing, managing, and processing data online, as
opposed to on a physical computer or network. In other words, cloud computing is the delivery of
computing services such as servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, etc. over the
Internet ("the cloud").

Figure 3 shows you the overview of the cloud computing system:

Figure: 3 - Cloud Computing

Characteristics

CLOUD COMPUTING

Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, providing shared resources, software, and information to computers and other devices on-demand, like the electricity grid. The "cloud" represents the Internet.

Cloud computing has the following five basic factors:

On-demand self-service.

Users are capable to provision, monitor, and operate computing resources as required without the help of human administrators.

Broad network access.

Computing services are delivered over standard networks and heterogeneous gadgets.

Rapid elasticity.

IT resources are capable to scale out and in fast and on a required basis.

Resource pooling.

IT resources are transmitted across multiple applications and tenants in a non-dedicated way.

Measured service.

IT resource utilization is followed for each application and tenant, normally for public cloud billing or private cloud chargeback

Common cloud samples are Microsoft Azure, One Drive, Google Drive, iCloud, etc.

It was made by Sam Johnston using OmniGroup's OmniGraffle and Inkscape, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The customer consists of hardware and software that access cloud benefits. A customer can be a thick client or a thin client. A thick client refers to a fully functional computer on each desk whereas a thin client machine provides just the functionality needed to accomplish the necessary tasks. Examples of thin clients include new-age smartphones, tablets, etc.

Note

Some freely available public clouds are
Google Drive, Amazon Web Services
(AWS) Which comes free for trial,
free starter plan of Red Hat Open Shift.

Cloud Services

Using clouds, many types of services are offered, and accessible to clients. There are broadly three types of cloud services offered that allow the clients to use an application or a platform or an infrastructure.

Common types of cloud services are discussed below

Software as a Service (SaaS)

In this type of service, a complete application is offered to the customer, as a service demand, the on-demand service. With SaaS, you don't have to fear the installation, setup, and running of the application. The service provider resolve that for you. You just have to pay and use it through some consumer. For example, using office applications online, using email services online, sending bulk emails using software, web conferencing, customer relationship management, project management, invoicing, and many more. Today SaaS is presented by companies such as Microsoft, Zoho, Google, Salesforce, etc.

Examples of commonly available SaaS are Google Apps, Microsoft Office 365, Zoho One, Zoho CRM, Salesforce Customer 360, etc.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

In this kind of service, a development environment is presented as a service, upon which other higher levels of service can be made. PaaS provides computing platforms that typically include an operating system, programming language execution environments, databases, web servers, and so forth. For example, PaaS can make you available a preconfigured Server and a front end to work on databases. The client has the freedom to make his own applications, which run on the provider's platform. To fulfill the manageability and scalability needs of the applications, PaaS providers offer a predefined combination of OS and application servers, such as the LAMP platform (Apache, MySQL, Linux, and PHP), restricted J2EE, Ruby, etc.

Examples of commonly available PaaS are AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Windows Azure, Heroku, Force.com, Google App Engine, and Apache Stratos.

Infrastructure as a Service (laaS)

IaaS provides basic storage and computing capacities as standardized services over the network. IaaS provides the computing infrastructure, physical or virtual engines like servers, and other resources like virtual-machine disk image library, block and file-based storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual local area networks, and so forth. The consumer would normally deploy his own software on the infrastructure.

Examples of commonly available IaaS are Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, Rackspace, Google Compute Engine, and many more.

SaaS	Highly scalable internet-based applications are hosted on the cloud and offered as services to the end-user.	acrobat.com, Google Docs, salesforce.com
PaaS	Here, the platforms used to design, develop, build and test applications are provided by the cloud infrastructure.	Google App Engine, Azure Service Platform, force.com.
laas	In this pay-per-use model, services like storage, database management and compute capabilities are offered on demand.	GoGrid, 3 Tera, Amazon Web Services.

Types of Cloud computing services.

Types of Clouds

There are various types of clouds that you can subscribe to depending on your demands. As a home user or small business owner, you will most likely operate public cloud services. Companies can decide to deploy applications on Public, Private or Hybrid clouds.

Private Clouds

A private cloud consists of computing resources used only owned by one business or organization. In a private cloud, the services and infrastructure are always maintained on a private network and the hardware and software are dedicated exclusively to one organization.

Private clouds are usually used by government agents, financial organizations, and any other mid-to large-size organizations with business-critical processes seeking enhanced command over their environment. A private cloud also learned as an internal or enterprise cloud resides on the company's intranet or hosted data center where all the data is protected by a firewall.

Public Clouds

A public cloud refers to a common cloud service made available to multiple subscribers. The cloud resources (like servers and storage) are owned and managed by a third-party cloud service provider and given over the Internet. In a public cloud, you transfer the same hardware, storage, and network devices with other organizations that operate the same cloud, called cloud "tenants."

Public cloud deployments are frequently operated to deliver web-based email, online office applications, storage, and testing and development environments.

Microsoft Azure, Google Drive, Amazon Cloud Drive, iCloud, etc. are examples of public cloud. The combination of public and private clouds is called the hybrid cloud and the clouds used by a group of related organizations are called the community cloud.

BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY

A blockchain is a distributed register (storing all the transactions) across a peer-to-peer (P2P) WEB network. Confused ?. Hmm. Well, don't be; just read the following hypothetical situation in order to understand the above statement

Hasan and Nitin were friends since their school days. During their adulthood, they were also doing business together. All their financial transactions took place through ABCDXYZ Bank where both Hasan, Nitin, and their clients made financial transactions. One day some common clients Hasan and Nitin hacked their financial data from the Bank and forged it. It led to heavy losses and the trust violation of clients.

After some time, Hasan and Nitin decided to continue the same business, but this time, they decided that every time a financial transaction would take place, each connected client would get a printed copy of it. So, all connected clients would get printed copies of each financial transaction taking place and thus would have their own copy of the ledger containing details of all financial transactions.

Every time a new transaction takes place, all available financial data is compared with the existing ledger; if they match, the transaction is considered valid. This happens at all clients' ends. So, if someone tries to forge data, then its data will not match all copies of the decentralized, distributed ledger available with all clients and thus will be rejected. Hasan and Nitin are happy with this secure form of financial transactions and so are their clients.

Now, in the second style of the financial transactions, you can see that

• the financial transactions' ledger is not at a centralized location like a bank, but is distributed and is available to all connected clients.
• Every transaction's details (called a block) are sent to all the connected clients (peer-to-peer network).
• Each new block is chained with earlier existing blocks (forming a blockchain) to form a distributed ledger.

This style of financial transaction is called blockchain technology. Now read the very first
line of this section again. Now, I am sure the confusion is no more there.

Let us now understand blockchain technology in technical terms.

Blockchain Technology Key terms

Before we discuss the working of blockchain technology, it is important to know about the key elements involved.

The key elements involved in the blockchain technology are :

Blockchain Technology.

It is a decentralized, digitized, public ledger of each of the online transactions (mostly financial, but not always) occurring among a network of peers. (peer-to-peer network)

Block.

A block guides to a secured data chip that stores encrypted details of a valid transaction that has surfaced online. A block consists of two parts:

• (i) a header, which is public to all, and
• (ii) private details of the transaction, accessible only to the owner of the block.

Blockchain.

It is the group of linked blocks, which are related to each other and are in a proper, linear chronological order. It stores the complete trail of transactions.

Public ledger.

All confirmed transactions' linked blocks since the first transaction are available in the form of a blockchain called a public ledger.

Mining.

It is the method of verifying a transaction after validation and adding it to the public log.

P2P Network (Peer-to-Peer Network).

The traditional architecture of www is the client-server type where the server stores all the information in a centralized database. The P2P network (Peer-to-Peer network) is the type of network used in blockchain technology. It is a distribution network where each participant computer within the network maintains, approves, and updates the new entries. Each participant has equal power.

(a) Client-Server network architecture of www.
(b) P2P (Peer-to-Peer) network architecture of blockchain technology.

How does Blockchain Technology Works?

You know that a block is a secure data chunk storing encrypted details (using cryptography) of a valid transaction. A block is created when a user initiates a transaction. It stores the encrypted details of the transaction taking place.

A block gets connected with the blockchain as a permanent database only after validation. A blockchain contains numerous linked blocks which are related to each other in a proper linear, chronological order.

Each block includes a hash of the earlier block. Hashing is a strong encrypting mechanism. Hashing not only encrypts but also makes forgery impossible because hashing cannot be reversed. Thus, a blockchain has complete information about different user addresses as well as their balances right from the origins set to the very recent completed block. Every node of the P2P network has access to the blockchain.

Blockchain technology ensures that all transactions are always available since its.
creation and no transaction can be deleted.

Blockchains have found their applications in healthcare, voting mechanisms, banking sector, finances, Asset management, insurance claim processing, passports, property registrations, and many more.

Figure: 6 - explains how blockchain technology works.

Figure: 6 - How blockchain technology works.

Benefits of Blockchain Technology

• Expanded time effectiveness due to the real-time transactions.
• Direct Transactions stop the overheads and intermediary charges.
• Reduced risks related to cybercrimes, fraud, and tampering.
• More transparent processes with accurate record creation and tracking.
• Highly protected due to cryptographic and decentralized Blockchain protocols.

Note

Many people assume that blockchain and cryptocurrency are the same. Blockchain is the underlying technology of cryptocurrency like a Bitcoin system.

Blockchains can be of these types :

Consortium blockchains.

In a consortium blockchain, the consensus process is managed by a pre-selected group- a group of companies, for example.

Semi-private blockchains.

Semi-private blockchains are handled by a single company that gives access to any user who fulfills pre-established criteria.

Private blockchains.

Private blockchains are maintained by a single organization that defines who can read it, submit transactions to it, and participate in the consensus process.

Public blockchains.

Anyone can read a public blockchain, send transactions to it, or participate in the consensus method. They are supposed to be "permissionless." Every transaction is general, and users can stay anonymous. Bitcoin and Ethereum are prominent samples of public blockchains.

In short, blockchain takes on all three most important roles of the traditional financial services: registration of transactions, identity verification, and contracting, in a decentralized interactive way. Thus, blockchain cannot only be used not only for sending digital money but also for tracking physical goods in a supply chain, helping companies to monitor their suppliers in real-time or for maintaining medical records, and in many other applications.

Note

The government of India has shown interest in the implementation of blockchain technology for many services like land registration, tax data exchange, funds transfer insurance claims settlement and many more.