According to Wikipedia, an unmanned aircraft system or unmanned aerial vehicle is an aircraft that flies without human crew on board the aircraft. … a UAV is defined as a reusable, uncrewed vehicle capable of controlled , sustained, level flight and powered by a jet or reciprocating engine.
So, what is the difference between an application running in your datacenter and an application running on the Cloud? Well, it is as different as an aircraft flown by a pilot and an unmanned aircraft system. Interestingly, both the Cloud application and the UAS share the same attributes! When you are running an enterprise application hosted at the datacenter in your backyard, you have a lot of liberty in controlling it. You can monitor it closely to track the performance and it is fairly easy to fix the bottlenecks. Same is the case with an aircraft flown by a professional pilot. He can determine the right altitude and the direction based on the wind speed and the weather conditions. The pilot will take every step to make sure that the flight is as safe as possible.
Running the same enterprise application on the Cloud is no different from flying an unmanned aircraft. You never know which server, datacenter or the continent that hosts your application. For the UAS, imagine the challenges involved in accurately gauging the external factors like the wind speed, direction and the altitude. The external factors that define the smooth operation of the Cloud application are traffic, resource usage and security. You got to tweak the application to meet these demands on the fly!Whether it is the Cloud application or the unmanned aircraft system, they need a sophisticated control center for remote operations. Apart from the remote control center, the constant communication between the control center and the UAS is very critical. UAS Control CenterThough it is obvious that most of the Cloud offerings expose ‘Compute’ and ‘Storage’ services, there is another crucial service which is the ‘Management’ service. This service connects your Cloud App with the control center at your end. By consuming this service, you will be able to tweak your application to meet the external conditions.
Key Services Exposed by Cloud
Amazon Web Services offer a mature API to take control of the infrastructure that runs your application. Microsoft Windows Azure Platform has a Service Management API that lets the developers programmatically control the Cloud application’s parameters.
source : Janakiram (Microsoft)
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