IT Infrastructure Setup using Cloud Services

Cloud Computing is emerging today as a commercial infrastructure that eliminates the need for maintaining expensive computing hardware. Through the use of virtualization, clouds promise to address with the same shared set of physical resources a large user base with different needs. Thus, clouds promises to provide a flexible IT architecture, accessible through internet from lightweight portable devices. Cloud computing is a set of IT services that are provided to a customer over a network on a leased basis and with the ability to scale up or down their service requirements. Usually Cloud Computing services are delivered by a third party provider who owns the infrastructure. Many industries, such as banking, healthcare and education are moving towards the cloud due to the efficiency of services provided by the pay-per-use pattern based on the resources such as processing power used, transactions carried out, bandwidth consumed, data transferred, or storage space occupied etc. In a cloud computing environment, the entire data resides over a set of networked resources, enabling the data to be accessed through virtual machines. In this work we present an evaluation of the usefulness of the current cloud computing services for infrastructure setup. We analyze the performance of the Amazon EC2 platform. We also compare using long-term traces the performance characteristics and cost models of clouds with those of other platforms. We will provide the guideline for using cloud services for setting up any IT infrastructure on cloud. This research paper also analyzes the key research challenges present in cloud computing and offers best practices to service providers as well as enterprises hoping to leverage cloud service to improve their bottom line in this severe economic climate.