Rajkumar Buyya - Mastering cloud computing: foundations and applications programming

First and foremost, we are grateful to all researchers and industrial developers worldwide for their contributions to various concepts and technologies discussed in this book. Our special thanks to all the members and consultants of Manjrasoft, the Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Lab of the University of Melbourne, and Melbourne Ventures, who contributed to the development of the Aneka Cloud Application Platform, the preparation of associated application demonstrators and documents, and/or the commercialization of the Aneka technology. They include Chu Xingchen, Srikumar Venugopal, Krishna Nadiminti, Christian Vecchiola, Dileban Karunamoorthy, Chao Jin, Rodrigo Calheiros, Michael Mattess, Jessie Wei, Enayat Masoumi, Ivan Mellado, Richard Day, Wolfgang Gentzsch, Laurence Liew, David Sinclair, Suraj Pandey, Abhi Shekar, Dexter Duncan, Murali Sathya, Karthik Sukumar, Ravi Kumar Challa, and Sita Venkatraman.

We thank the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science, and Research (DIISR) for supporting our research and commercialization endeavors.

We thank all of our colleagues at the University of Melbourne, especially Professors Rao Kotagiri, Iven Mareels, and Glyn Davis, for their mentorship and positive support for our research and our efforts to impart the knowledge we have gained.

We thank all colleagues and users of the Aneka technology for their direct and indirect contributions to application case studies reported in the book. Our special thanks to Raghavendra Kune from ADRIN/ISRO for his enthusiastic efforts in creating a satellite image-processing application using Aneka and publishing articles in this area. We thank Srinivasa Iyengar from MSRIT for creating data-mining applications using Aneka and demonstrating the power of Aneka to academics from the early days of cloud computing.

We thank the members of the CLOUDS Lab for proofreading one or more chapters. They include Rodrigo Calheiros, Nikolay Grozev, Amir Vahid, Anton Beloglazov, Adel Toosi, Deepak Poola, Mohammed AlRokayan, Atefeh Khosravi, Sareh Piraghaj, and Yaser Mansouri.

We thank our family members, including Smrithi Buyya, Soumya Buyya, and Radha Buyya, for their love and understanding during the preparation of the book.

We sincerely thank external reviewers commissioned by the publisher for their critical comments and suggestions on enhancing the presentation and organization of many chapters at a finer level. This has greatly helped us improve the quality of the book.

Finally, we would like to thank the staff at Elsevier Inc for their enthusiastic support and guidance during the preparation of the book. In particular, we thank Todd Green for inspiring us to take up this project and for setting the process of publication in motion. The Elsevier staff were wonderful to work with!

Professor Rajkumar Buyya, The University of Melbourne and Manjrasoft Pty Ltd, Australia

Dr. Christian Vecchiola, The University of Melbourne and IBM Research, Australia

Professor S. Thamarai Selvi, Madras Institute of Technology, Anna University, Chennai, India

The growing popularity of the Internet and the Web, along with the availability of powerful handheld computing, mobile, and sensing devices, are changing the way we interact, manage our lives, conduct business, and access or deliver services. The lowering costs of computation and communication are driving the focus from personal to datacenter-centric computing. Although parallel and distributed computing has been around for several years, its new forms, multicore and cloud computing, have brought about a sweeping change in the industry. These trends are pushing the industry focus from developing applications for PCs to cloud datacenters that enable millions of users to use software simultaneously.

Computing is being transformed to a model consisting of commoditized services delivered in a manner similar to utilities such as water, electricity, gas, and telephony. As a result, information technology (IT) services are billed and delivered as computing utilities over shared delivery networks, akin to water, electricity, gas, and telephony services delivery. In such a model, users access services based on their requirements, regardless of where those services are hosted. Several computing paradigms have promised to deliver this utility computing vision. Cloud computing is the most recent emerging paradigm promising to turn the vision of computing utilities into a reality.