The History About Cloud Mashups

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

2.1 Introduction

Today, the information can be considered as one of the main resources. Some theorist speaks about the Information Age, based on the idea of the current age, where people had ability to transfer information freely and have instant access to a shared knowledge. This idea is the direct consequence of the digital revolution in information and communication technologies. This created the platform for a free flow of information, ideas and knowledge across the globe. This revolution has made a profound impression on the way, the world functions.

The main problems are to manage this enormous variety of information, to extract knowledge from data, to link together right information to build new knowledge, because data without a right contextualization cannot bring any useful information.

The problem of information management is very complex. In a global connected world there is a need to select, manage, use and mash all information belonging to the different information sources to obtain the needed answer in a quicker and easy way.

The computer science, with its storage, elaboration and communication capabilities, can be used to solve this problem. The philosophy that governs mashups can be a possible solution to this problem i.e. giving everyone the possibility of mashing data belonging to different information sources.

The Software production sector for enterprises is certainly one of the most interested scenarios. There is the need for Situational Applications, software built to manage particular business processes linked to the different realities. Very often the resources destined to the production of these applications are limited, because of the lower relevance that they have in the global mission. The tendency is to adopt low quality software or to use non-conventional alternatives, using software built for other purposes to achieve own goals.

The main difficulty to invest in the production of software of this kind is in the "artistic" and "social" nature of the business processes to model as they do not allow their implementation in Enterprise Applications.

So, the challenge is to provide very flexible, agile and low cost methods and processes to develop Situational Applications, in order to exploit the business. The possibilities offered by Web 2.0 technologies are some of the most accredited solutions to this problem. In this scenario Mashups have a great relevance.

Mashup

The word "mashup" recurs in some different context, assuming each time a different meaning; for example:

In music, a mashup is a song or composition created by blending two or more songs

In cinematography, a video mashup is the combination of multiple sources of video

In digital production, a digital mashup is a digital media file containing any or all of text, graphics, audio, video and animation drawn from pre-existing sources, to create a new derivative work.

Mashups stands on the fundamental concept of data and services integration, to operate in this way there are three main primitives: Combination, Aggregation and Visualization.

The first allows to collect data from heterogeneous sources and to use them within the same application

the second primitive allows to operate on collected data having a measure and building new information starting from them

the last is used to integrate data in a visual way using maps or other multimedia objects.

Cloud Mashup

In order to answer what is a cloud mash up perhaps we should first answer the question, what is a mashup? "a mashup is a term used to describe a web-based application that combines information from two or more sources to present a new service." For an example, think about a news website that pulls in weather updates from Weather.com (or other), or stocks and shares info, currency rates or even additional news items from Reuters. The resulting end product is a mashup of its component parts.

Mashups use an API (Application Programming Interface) to combine different website elements. API is basically a set of software-to-software programming instructions that work on the web. APIs allow one piece of web-based software to talk to another in a process controlled by the API itself. Now we know what mashups are and we know how they interconnect. A cloud mashup then is quite simply a web-based instance of a mashup, but the application content itself resides in the cloud. The reasons are:

If your cloud mashup is by its very nature hosted in the cloud then it will be sat next to some useful software building tools if you subscribe to a cloud mashup centre service. A good enterprise mashup platform features reusable application building blocks that can be built into new applications or incorporated into existing applications.

2.2 Concepts of Cloud Mashups

Cloud mashups can be realized in many different ways, just as they can cover differing scopes, depending on their actual purpose. Most current considerations assume that the definition of standard interfaces and protocols will ensure interoperability between providers. This allows consumers to control and use different existing cloud systems in a coherent fashion. Also this enables SOA (Service-oriented Architecture)-like composition of capabilities by integrating the respective functions into meta-capabilities that can act across various cloud systems/platforms/infrastructures.

2.3 Realizing Resource Mashups

Resource cloud mashups

Outsourcing computation and/or storage away from the local infrastructure is not a new concept itself. Already the grid and Web service domain used these concepts to allow integration of remote resource for seemingly local usage. However, the configuration and management overhead of grids greatly exceeds one of the well-known cloud providers and therefore encourages, in particular, average users to use the system. Furthermore, clouds address an essential economical factor, namely, elastic scaling according to need, thereby theoretically reducing unnecessary resource loads.

Realizing resource mashups

In order to realize efficient cloud mashups on an infrastructure level, distributed data and segmented image management have to be combined. We can distinguish between the base image set consisting of (a) the setup environment and any engine, (b) the base dataset that may be customer-specific, such as general data that are provided to the user, but also and more importantly the applet or service base that is provided to each user equally and (c) the user-specific information which may differ per access and which may only be available on a single machine.

Essentially all cloud systems can be reduced to an (enhanced) Infrastructure as a Service environment or resource cloud with additional segmentation capabilities over its contents, respectively the functionalities it provides.

Applying Resource Mashups

In particular the overall structure of decision making and image distribution takes a user-centric approach. The relationships between customers and users and their data requirements are respected, so as to ensure availability while maintaining scale restrictions. As data are replicated according to the scaling behavior, concurrent availability from multiple sites is guaranteed as long as scaling and segmentation do not move a currently accessed dataset.

In other words, by analyzing user behavior (data consumption) in the same way as for data segmentation, specific requirements can be assessed before the user environment is passed to a new host. Prior to a potential redirecting of the user's access route, the availability of next required datasets needs to be ensured, only after successful rerouting and the initial dataset may be destroyed.