Cloud Computing Architectures and Applications

This week’s journal articles and resources provide insight into the different cloud computing architectures and services currently available. These cloud computing architectures include infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), a development and deployment platform for running application in the cloud known as platform-as-a-service (Pass), and access to applications through the Internet called software-as-a-service (SaaS).

Amazon Web Services provides a scalable platform for the development of flexible applications. In addition, Amazon also provides computing services through a service called EC2. Another service from Microsoft, called Microsoft Azure, includes computing, storage, and network services. Built on top of Microsoft’s datacenters, it provides developers with a collection of services for building applications with cloud technology. In addition to these services, there are open source solutions, including OpenStack, Apache CloudStack, and Hadoop for building public and private clouds.

These solutions provide a number of benefits, but they also include risks. As new types of architectures and applications emerge, CTOs and IT professionals must be able to effectively evaluate them to understand their potential benefits, as well as the risks they may pose.

For this Discussion, you will analyze the various types of Cloud Services. You will assess two competing cloud development platforms, and you will investigate open-source platforms and how they compare against the privately-held platforms.

To Prepare:

Research additional articles on the Microsoft Azure and the Amazon EC2 cloud computing applications.
Find additional articles and research on Open Source cloud computing applications.

Submit a 5- to 6-paragraph post that responds to the following in precise, well-defined terms, and with reference to this week’s Learning Resources:

SAMPLE SOLUTION

The recent advancement and acceptance of cloud computing among the business and organizations has seen the rise of open-source cloud computing platforms that help developers to customize the computing platforms. There are various open cloud computing systems, including the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amzon EC2), AWS cloud services, and Microsoft Azure. This discussion seeks to compare Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Microsoft Azure as cloud computing open source.  According to Gandhi and Kumbharana (2014), Amazon EC2 is a web service that offers resizable computing capacity in the cloud; the design facilitates web-scale computing for the developers. On the other hand, Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform designed to help organizations run virtual desktops and operate their applications in the cloud (Ucuz, 2020).  Moreover, Microsoft Azure offers the organization a built-in migration tool that permits the administrators to migrate the Windows server desktops…