ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a detailed look at the basic concepts of cloud computing. A PaaS cloud provides service to customers in the form of a platform on which the customer’s applications can run. A number of other cloud services have been proposed, with some available as vendor offerings. The organization is faced with a range of choices as to cloud ownership and management. A public cloud infrastructure is made available to the general public or a large industry group and is owned by an organization selling cloud services. A private cloud is implemented within the internal information technology environment of the organization. A community cloud shares characteristics of private and public clouds. Like a private cloud, a community cloud has restricted access. The roles of the cloud consumer and provider have already been discussed. The service layer contains the implementation of the services provided by a cloud service provider.
