1520-9202/10/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE P u b l i s h e d b y t h e I E E E C o m p u t e r S o c i e t y computer.org/ITPro 17

Guest editors’ introduction

Liang-Jie Zhang, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Jia Zhang, Northern Illinois University

Jinan Fiaidhi, Lakehead University

J. Morris Chang, Iowa State University

Cloud computing has become a scalable-services consumption and delivery plat-form in the field of services comput-ing.1 It aims to share resources among

cloud-service consumers and cloud partners and vendors in the value chain shown in Figure 1.

The resource sharing at different levels results in various cloud offerings: infrastructure as a service (IaaS) focuses on hardware and IT in-frastructure management, platform as a service (PaaS) concentrates on middleware and design tools as a service, software as a service (SaaS) deals with traditional software applications such as customer relationship management or social networking as a service, and business process as a service (also known as the business cloud) of-fers value-added services. To tie some of these as-pects together, we use the cloud computing open architecture (CCOA)2 as the landscape to illus-trate some hot topics about cloud computing.

Hot TopicsFigure 2 illustrates a cloud ecosystem for in-tegrating the various participants of the cloud value chain. The technical foundations of cloud computing include service-oriented architecture

(SOA) and virtualizations of hardware and soft-ware. The current trend is to push cloud com-puting to enrich its technical foundations so it can seamlessly share resources at all levels, there-by generating more value.

Figure 2 also shows some hot topics in this area categorized in layers in two dimensions. Hardware and software virtualization and infra-structure management provide the fundamental platform (see layer 2). SOA covers the service-orientation layer in Figure 2 (layer 3). All reusable services for the cloud computing platform and application-specific services should be defined based on the SOA to enable the cloud’s reusabil-ity and extensibility. Software offerings and ap-plications are important related issues (layer 4), as are the business solutions (layer 5).

Cloud information architecture covers data models such as XML, as well as the cloud ser-vice construction and deployment platform (layer 6). Cloud computing maintenance and management, as well as best enabling practices, are hot topics for the cloud quality and gover-nance layer (layer 7). This layer covers security, collaboration, and standards. In addition, cloud computing consulting methods, design and

Hot Topics in Cloud Computing

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18 IT Pro September/October 2010

Guest editors’ introduction

development tools, and killer applications in vertical industries are becoming core enabling weapons to support cloud transformation.

The cloud computing infrastructure itself is still evolving, but CCOA is an example refer-ence architecture for building cloud computing solutions.2

In This IssueIn “Establishing Trust in Cloud Computing,” Khaled M. Khan and Qutaibah Malluhi explain the issue of trust in cloud computing—an is-sue of paramount concern for cloud custom-ers. Then they discuss emerging technologies that might tackle the trust issue and suggest that better transparency and more consumer control are two key solutions. This article con-tributes to trust in the cloud in terms of the cloud quality and governance layer (see A1 in Figure 2).

In “Experiments with Storage and Preserva-tion of NASA’s Planetary Data via the Cloud,” Chris A. Mattmann, Daniel J. Crichton, Andrew F. Hart, Sean C. Kelly, and J. Steven Hughes re-port a case study of migrating from traditional software engineering solutions to cloud comput-ing to support large-scale scientific data stor-age and movement. The article also presents

Figure 1. The cloud value chain. Cloud vendors offer services to consumers, while cloud partners help facilitate interactions between the two.

Resources

Cloud partnerCloud vendor

Cloud-serviceconsumer

Figure 2. A cloud ecosystem. The ecosystem comprises seven layers (labeled in blue) for integrating the four components of the cloud value chain (labeled in green). We also show where the articles of this special issue (labeled A1–4) fall in this landscape.

Cloud client dashboard(Sign-in process, Web-based portal for cloud clients)

1C

1B

1A

1D

76

2

3

4

5

Cloud provisioning service

Cloud horizontal businessservices

Cloud vertical businessservices

Cloud subscription service

Cloud value-added services or offerings(A2: Data as a service)

Cloud IT infrastructure management(A3: Network I/O virtualization)

Cloud core infrastructure(A2: Storage; A3: Network infrastructure)

Cloud vendor dashboard(Sign-in process, Web-based portal for cloud vendor)

Mainframe Servers

Datacenter

Clou

d ec

osys

tem

man

agem

ent

(Use

r acc

ount

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ent s

ervi

ce)

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ality

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(A1:

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4: S

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Clou

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1

Cloud offerings: Business solutions

Cloud core: Provisioning and subscription services

Service-orientation: Common reusable services and composite services

Virtualization: Hardware and software

Cloud ecosystem

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computer.org/ITPro 19

metrics-based analytical results on evaluating several cloud platforms. The engineering prac-tice of enabling data as a service illustrates a cloud offering as well as storage virtualization (see A2 in Figure 2).

In “Network I/O Virtualization for Cloud Computing,” Yan Luo introduces network I/O virtualization technologies toward scalable data- center networking for cloud computing. Luo also discusses the advantages and challenges, ad-dressing some of the issues in the virtualization layer (see A3 in Figure 2).

In “Interoperable Security Standards for Web Services,” Sitaraman Lakshminarayanan dis-cusses the set of Web services security standards and explains how they can interoperate to secure a Web service in a cloud environment. Lakshmi-narayanan then illustrates a sample security ar-chitecture to secure Web services in the context of a mixture of heterogeneous systems and cloud service models. The accomplishments presented in this article contribute to the security standards in the cloud quality and governance layer (see A4 in Figure 2).

This special issue also features two related de-partments. In “Time to Push the Cloud,” John Walz and David Alan Grier advocate the cloud computing paradigm by analyzing its compris-ing models, benefits, and challenges. In the From the Editors department, “Ethics and the Cloud,” Keith W. Miller and Jeffrey Voas discuss the rap-idly emerging cloud computing paradigm from an ethical perspective.

C loud computing is no longer just paper-based discussions about its hype.3 It’s quickly evolving and gradually

realizing its business value. It’s now attract-ing more and more researchers and practi-tioners, who are creating innovations around its core enabling technologies and architec-tural building blocks. For more information and research results on this topic, we refer readers to the Proceedings of the IEEE Interna-tional Conference on Cloud Computing (IEEE CS Press, 2010).

AcknowledgmentsWe give our special thanks to the reviewers who helped solicit high-quality articles that present state-of-the-art theories and

techniques, showcase successfully deployed applications, or dem-onstrate challenging issues in the area of cloud computing.

References 1. L.-J. Zhang, J. Zhang, and H. Cai, Services Computing,

Springer, 2007. 2. L.-J. Zhang and Q. Zhou, “CCOA: Cloud Computing

Open Architecture,” Proc. IEEE Int’l Conf. Web Services (ICWS 09), IEEE Press, 2009, pp. 607–616.

3. J. Voas and J. Zhang, “Cloud Computing: New Wine or Just a New Bottle?” IT Professional, Mar./Apr. 2009, pp. 15–17.

Liang-Jie Zhang is a research staff member and program manager of application architectures and realization at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. His technical interests include services computing, Internet media, and software engineering. Zhang has a PhD in pattern recognition and intelligent control from Tsinghua University. Contact him at zhanglj@ieee.org.

Jia Zhang is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Northern Illinois University. Her technical interests center around services computing. Zhang has a PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois, Chicago. She is a member of IEEE. Contact her at jiazhang@cs.niu.edu.

Jinan Fiaidhi is a professor and graduate coordinator in the department of computer science at Lakehead Uni-versity, Ontario-Canada. She’s also an adjunct research professor at the University of Western Ontario-Canada. Her research interests include mobile and collaborative learning, ubiquitous computing, and Web-oriented ar-chitectures. Fiaidhi received her PhD from Brunel Uni-versity, UK. She’s a Professional Engineer of Ontario and a senior member of IEEE. Contact her at jfiaidhi@lakeheadu.ca.

J. Morris Chang is an associate professor of electri-cal and computer engineering at Iowa State Univer-sity. His research interests include wireless networks, object-oriented programming languages, and embedded computer systems. Chang has a PhD in computer en-gineering from North Carolina State University. He is a senior member of IEEE. Contact him at morris@iastate.edu.

SelectedCSarticlesandcolumnsareavailable forfreeathttp://ComputingNow.computer.org.

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