ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the concept of cloud computing. It describes its definition, presents the cloud delivery and deployment models, and highlights its benefits for enterprises. The chapter discusses the primary challenges faced while provisioning a cloud service—namely, scalability, multitenancy, and availability. It also describes virtualization technology, which is one of the fundamental components of cloud computing, Virtualization allows the creation of a secure, customizable, and isolated execution environment for running applications without affecting other users' applications. Virtualization is a basic tenet of cloud computing—which simplifies some of the resource management tasks. Business Process Management (BPM) is a commitment to expressing, understanding, representing, and managing a business in terms of a collection of business processes that are responsive to a business environment of internal or external events. The chapter introduces service-oriented architecture (SOA) to explain the realization of processes in terms of Web services.
