Theme: analysis works on the creating of cloud date centers. Plan: Plan: Cloud User’s Expectations

In this Chapter we address the expectations and benefits of the key cloud stake­holders: providers and users. We explain in details what cloud users expect from their cloud services. We highlight the benefits that arise from using virtualization. We then show how we can build holistic networking architectures that leads to user-centric clouds. Finally, we present our reference cloud network architecture.

• In this Chapter we address the expectations and benefits of the key cloud stake­holders: providers and users. We explain in details what cloud users expect from their cloud services. We highlight the benefits that arise from using virtualization. We then show how we can build holistic networking architectures that leads to user-centric clouds. Finally, we present our reference cloud network architecture.
• It is clear that cloud applications have released the user from the obligation of having one device at one location. Therefore users have become more mobile and started using different end-devices to access their web-based cloud applications from different locations. Their demand over high availability, fast connectivity and less service disruption has increased over time, leaving no room for errors for the cloud providers.

To illustrate the expectation of mobile cloud users we give in the following ex­ample scenario: employees who spend most of their time roaming outside their office need a flexible solution to stay connected to the cloud infrastructure of their company releasing them from the burden of terminal devices: virtual desktop in­frastructures (VDI). VDIs are virtual machines that host desktop operating systems (i.e., Windows, Linux, etc.) connected to other local services on a data center (i.e., database, lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP), etc.). The benefits of such service are numerous: (i) it makes easier to deploy applications that need different operating systems; (ii) it allows staying hooked to the company database in the cloud; (iii) it allows the access to the service anywhere at anytime. However, VDI still depend on the network infrastructure between the user and the virtual machine.

• To illustrate the expectation of mobile cloud users we give in the following ex­ample scenario: employees who spend most of their time roaming outside their office need a flexible solution to stay connected to the cloud infrastructure of their company releasing them from the burden of terminal devices: virtual desktop in­frastructures (VDI). VDIs are virtual machines that host desktop operating systems (i.e., Windows, Linux, etc.) connected to other local services on a data center (i.e., database, lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP), etc.). The benefits of such service are numerous: (i) it makes easier to deploy applications that need different operating systems; (ii) it allows staying hooked to the company database in the cloud; (iii) it allows the access to the service anywhere at anytime. However, VDI still depend on the network infrastructure between the user and the virtual machine.