Cloud Computing Environment: A Review

Abstract

Cloud computing is a vigorous technology by which a user can get software, application, operating system and hardware as a service without actually possessing it and paying only according to the usage. Cloud Computing is a hot topic of research for the researchers these days. With the rapid growth of Internet technology cloud computing have become main source of computing for small as well big IT companies. In the cloud computing milieu the cloud data centers and the users of the cloud-computing are globally situated, therefore it is a big challenge for cloud data centers to efficiently handle the requests which are coming from millions of users and service them in an efficient manner.Cloud computing is Internet based development and use of computer technology. It is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them. Scheduling is one of the core steps to efficiently exploit the capabilities of heterogeneous computing systems. On cloud computing platform, load balancing of the entire system can be  dynamically handled  by  using  virtualization  technology through which it  becomes  possible  to  remap  virtual  machine  and physical resources  according  to  the  change  in  load. However, in order to improve performance, the virtual machines have to fully utilize its resources and services by adapting to computing environment dynamically.  The  load balancing  with  proper  allocation  of  resources  must  be guaranteed  in  order  to  improve  resource  utility.  Load balancing is a critical aspect that ensures that all the resources and entities are well balanced such that no resource or entity neither is under loaded nor overloaded. The load balancing algorithms can be static or dynamic.  Load balancing in this environment means equal distribution of workload across all the nodes. Load balancing provides a way of achieving the proper utilization of resources and better user satisfaction. Hence, use of an appropriate load balancing algorithm is necessary for selecting the virtual machines or servers. This paper focuses on the load balancing algorithm which distributes the incoming jobs among VMs optimally in cloud data centers. In this paper, we have reviewed several existing load balancing mechanisms and we have tried to address the problems associated with them.