FORM-2
THE PATENTS ACT, 1970
(39 of 1970)
&
THE PATENTS RULES, 2003
PROVISIONAL SPECIFICATION
(See section 10 and rule 13)


CLOUD COMPUTING SYSTEM
SPRYLOGIC TECHNOLOGIES LTD.,
an Indian Company of A/1, Aplab House, Wagle Estate, Thane 400 604, Maharashtra, India

The following specification particularly describes the nature of the invention.


FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to the field of cloud computing.
In particular, this invention relates to systems and apparatus for optimization of cloud computing.
DEFINITIONS OF TERMS USED IN THE SPECIFICATION
The expression 'cloud' is used in the specification as a metaphor for 'the internet', based on how the internet is depicted in computer network diagrams and is an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it conceals.
The expression 'cloud computing' refers to a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.
These definitions are additions to those expressed in the art.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION & PRIOR ART
Traditional business applications like those from SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle have always been too complicated and expensive. They need a complicated software stack including a data center with office space, power systems, cooling facilities, bandwidth, network, servers, and storage facilities. Furthermore, it is necessary to have a team of experts to install, configure, and run them. They also need development, testing, staging, production, and failover environments.
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Cloud computing comes into focus to provide a better solution to Information Technology (IT). Cloud computing encompasses a subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the internet, extends IT's existing capacity or capability on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software.
Businesses run all kinds of applications in the cloud these days, like CRM, HR, accounting, and custom-built applications. Cloud-based apps can be up and running in a few days, which is unheard of with traditional business software. They cost less because there is no need to pay for the human resources, products, and facilities required to run them. Moreover, they are more scalable, more secure, and more reliable than most applications. Furthermore, upgrades are taken care of thereby ensuring security, performance enhancements and new features automatically. Since the payment is a predictable monthly subscription, businesses can spare their valuable IT resources and use it for deploying more applications, new projects and innovations.
By their very nature, cloud computing technology is much easier and quicker to integrate with other enterprise applications (both traditional software and cloud computing infrastructure-based), whether third-party or homegrown.
The benefits of cloud computing can be summarized as follows:
• World-class service delivery: Cloud computing infrastructures offer much greater scalability, complete disaster recovery, and impressive uptime numbers.
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• No hardware or software to install: a 100% cloud computing infrastructure is simple and requires significantly fewer capital expenditures to get it up and running.
• Faster and lower-risk deployment: The infrastructure can be up and running in a fraction of the time required for traditional setups even with extensive customization or integration.
• Support for deep customization: The cloud computing infrastructure not only allows deep customization and application configurations, it preserves all those customizations even during upgrades. Furthermore, cloud computing technology is ideal for application development to support an organization's evolving needs.
• Empowered business users: Cloud computing technology allows on-the-fly, point-and-click customization and report generation for business users, so IT doesn't spend time making minor changes and running reports.
• Automatic upgrades that don't impact IT resources: Cloud computing infrastructures put an end to the huge IT dilemma of spending time and resources on rebuilding the customizations and integrations when upgrades of applications are carried out. Cloud computing technology automatically preserves the customizations and integrations during an upgrade and hence there is no need to choose between upgrading and preserving all the hard work gone into customizations and integrations.


The cloud computing infrastructure also results in significant savings in administrative costs to the extent of more than 50 percent in comparison to client/server software.
The areas in which cloud computing saves administrative costs include:
• Basic customization - empowers the administrators and business users to perform basic customizations themselves.
• Real-time reporting - Easy wizards step users through report and dashboard creation, so IT's queue is free of report requests.
• Security and sharing models - The sharing model built into the cloud computing infrastructure protects sensitive data while making the management of security profiles much less time-consuming.
• Multiple languages and currencies - Included support for multiple languages and currencies make managing a global application easier.
The offerings of cloud computing can be characterized into three levels of clouds.
Applications in the cloud: This is also referred to as Software as a Service or SaaS. It is a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. SaaS software vendors may host the application on their own web servers or download the application to the consumer device, disabling it after use or after the on-demand contract expires. The on-demand function may be handled internally to share licenses within a firm or by a third-party application service provider (ASP) sharing licenses between firms. Gmail, yahoo mail, wordpress.com, the various search engines, wikipedia, encyclopedia,
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britannica, and the like are examples of SaaS. Some company hosts an application in the internet that many users sign-up for and use without any concern about where, how, by whom the compute cycles and storage bits are provided.
Platforms in the cloud: This is also referred to as Platform as a service or PaaS. It is the delivery of a computing platform and solution stack as a service. It facilitates deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software layers, providing all of the facilities required to support the complete life cycle of building and delivering web applications and services entirely available from the Internet with no software downloads or installation for developers, IT managers or end-users. Developers write their application to a more or less open specification and then upload their code into the cloud where the application is run, typically being able to scale up automatically as usage for the application grows. Mosso, Google App Engine, and Force.com are examples of PaaS.
Infrastructure in the cloud: This is also referred to as Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS. It is the delivery of computer infrastructure as a service. These 'virtual infrastructure stacks' are an example of the 'everything as a service' trend and shares many of the common characteristics. Rather than purchasing servers, software, data center space or network equipment, clients instead buy those resources as a fully outsourced service. The service is typically billed on a utility computing basis and the amount of resources consumed (and therefore the cost) will typically reflect the level of activity.
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This is the most general offering that Amazon has pioneered and where RightScale offers its management platform. Developers and system administrators obtain general compute, storage, queuing, and other resources and run their applications with the fewest limitations. This is the most powerful type of cloud in that virtually any application and any configuration that is fit for the internet can be mapped to this type of service.
Cloud computing thus takes away some of the mundane pain from dealing with the raw infrastructure. The user of the service does not necessarily care about how it is implemented, what technologies are used or how it is managed. The only concern for the user is the access to the service with a high level of reliability. It is therefore a challenge to the computing resource vendors to live up to the promise of managing everything seamlessly and ensure that the functional constraints won't cause applications to have to move up to the infrastructure clouds as they mature and gain complexity.
It is also generally expected to meet quality of service (QoS) requirements of the customers and is typically covered by service level agreements (SLAs) including financial penalties. The cloud computing systems known in the art handle requests in a random manner. This leads to congested queues, increase in the computing time and ultimately escalated costs.
Keeping in mind the challenges faced by a computing resource provider, it is also very critical for the end user to be able to make a choice depending on the most cost effective provider of services.
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OBJECTS OF THE INVENTION
An object of the invention is to provide a cloud computing system that can categorize requests received from client computing devices.
Another object of the invention is to provide a cloud computing system that can aggregate requests received from client computing devices.
Still another object of the invention is to provide a cloud computing system that can optimize and arbitrate the client computing device to the most cost effective vendor.
Yet another object of the invention is to provide a more reliable and cost effective cloud computing system.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF ACCOMPANYING DRAWINGS
The invention will now be described with the help of accompanying drawings, in which:
FIGURE 1 illustrates an overview of a cloud computing system in accordance with the present invention;
FIGURE 2 illustrates a block diagram of a cloud computing system in accordance with the present invention; and
FIGURE 3 illustrates a flow diagram of a cloud computing system in accordance with the present invention.
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DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION
The invention will now be described with reference to the embodiment shown in the accompanying drawings. The embodiment does not limit the scope and ambit of the invention. The description relates purely to the exemplary preferred embodiment of the invention and its suggested application.
In accordance with the present invention, a system is envisaged, wherein the proposed system authenticates client requests for resources and within specified parameters, dynamically chooses the most cost-effective provider for a resource or service.
FIGURE 1 illustrates an overview of a cloud computing system in accordance with the present invention and is reference generally by numeral 100. The system will now be described with reference to FIGURE 1 and FIGURE 2, wherein a block diagram of the cloud computing system in accordance with the present invention is illustrated and is referenced generally by numeral 200.
The block diagram and the description hereto are merely illustrative and only exemplify the invention and in no way limit the scope thereof.
The system in accordance with the present invention comprises an arbitration / aggregation / optimization means represented by numeral 10. Clients are represented by numeral 50. A client consists of computer hardware and / or computer software which relies on cloud computing for application delivery, or which is specifically designed for delivery of cloud
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services and which, in either case, is essentially useless without it. An auditing means represented by numeral 30 checks for the network connection between the clients 50 and the arbitration / aggregation / optimization means 10 and forwards the connection status to the arbitration / aggregation / optimization means 10. A validating means represented by numeral 40 authenticates the request from the clients 50 by validating the operational parameters set by the clients 50 and forwards the validation status to the arbitration / aggregation / optimization means 10. The arbitration / aggregation / optimization means 10 receives the authenticated and validated requests from the clients 50 and grants a token or certificate for the request to the clients 50. The arbitration / aggregation / optimization means 10 aggregates requests for optimization based on the type of request and arbitrates to the most cost effective cloud computing resource vendor represented by numeral 20 for the most cost effective pricing scheme.
The system in accordance with the present invention will now be further described with reference to a flow diagram illustrated in FIGURE 3. The steps involved in the cloud computing system arbitrating to the most cost effective vendor after aggregation and optimization are as follows:
Step 10: Initiation of a request for computing resource(s) by clients (referenced by numeral 50 in FIGURES 1 and 2).
Step 20: Checking the network connection between the clients 50 (referenced by numeral 50 in FIGURES 1 and 2) and an arbitration / aggregation / optimization means (referenced by numeral 10 in FIGURES 1 and 2) by an auditing means (referenced by numeral 30 in FIGURES 1 and 2). If the network connection is found to be secure (for example SSL), the
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arbitration / aggregation / optimization means (referenced by numeral 10 in FIGURES 1 and 2) is provided with the secure status information; else the request for service is terminated.
Step 30: Authenticating the identity of clients and the requests received by a validating means (referenced by numeral 30 in FIGURES 1 and 2) by validating the operational parameters (for example ID and passwords at various levels) set by clients (referenced by numeral 50 in FIGURES 1 and 2) with reference to the parameters assigned by the cloud computing resource vendors (referenced by numeral 20 in FIGURES 1 and 2). If the request is authenticated and validated, the same will be forwarded to the arbitration / aggregation / optimization means (referenced by numeral 10 in FIGURES 1 and 2); else the request for service is terminated.
Step 40: Aggregating the authenticated and validated requests from clients (referenced by numeral 50 in FIGURES 1 and 2) based on the type of request and issuing them a token or certificate for the received requests.
Step 50: The optimizing means starts the study of the aggregated requests and looks for the most cost effective cloud computing resource vendor (referenced by numeral 20 in FIGURES 1 and 2).
Step 60: Monitoring the validity of the token or certificate. The authenticated and validated requests from clients (referenced by numeral 50 in FIGURES 1 and 2) are processed further if the token or certificate is valid; else the request for service is terminated.
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Step 70: Arbitrating the request to the most cost effective cloud computing resource vendor (referenced by numeral 20 in FIGURES 1 and 2).
Step 80: Monitoring the quality of service of the cloud computing resource vendor (referenced by numeral 20 in FIGURES 1 and 2) and their resource pricing policies.
The cloud computing resources are accessed on demand and adopt a usage based pricing scheme. The identification of the most cost effective vendor is based on comparing the pricing policies across vendors and determining within the specified operational parameters which requests can be aggregated for a particular pricing scheme and selecting and assigning resources that translate to the least cost. A multicast spanning tree algorithm or similar can be used to determine the least cost node (service or resource). The service itself could be virtualized and if required hosted on a cloud (virtualized computing resources).
TECHNICAL ADVANCEMENTS
The technical advancements offered by the present invention include the realization of:
• a cloud computing system that can categorize requests received from client computing devices;
• a cloud computing system that can aggregate requests received from client computing devices;
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• a cloud computing system that can optimize and arbitrate the client computing device to the most cost effective vendor; and
• a more reliable and cost effective cloud computing system.
While considerable emphasis has been placed herein on the particular features of this invention, it will be appreciated that various modifications can be made, and that many changes can be made in the preferred embodiment without departing from the principles of the invention. These and other modifications in the nature of the invention or the preferred embodiments will be apparent to those skilled in the art from the disclosure herein, whereby it is to be distinctly understood that the foregoing descriptive matter is to be interpreted merely as illustrative of the invention and not as a limitation.

MOHAN DEWAN OfR.K.DEWAN&CO. APPLICANT'S PATENT ATTORNEY