A cloud system is categorized into the three following types:
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SaaS (Software as a Service)
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a software distribution model. In the model, the software applications are not installed in the user’s computer. They are provided by the vendor or service provider and the users can utilized the function of them through Internet.
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PaaS (Platform as a Service)
Platform as a Service (PaaS) provides the hardware, operating system and network to execute the software application by SaaS.
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IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides the infrastructure for constituting systems, such as CPU, storage, OS, middleware, and so on by using virtualization technology through Internet.
The “Service” in SaaS is “the function of software”. That is, the service offers not the software itself but a function in the network. On the contrary, the term ‘SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)’ is a software architecture design on the construction of a grand scale computer system and the service in SOA means “the software parts for realizing service due to business model cases”. That is, it is a business component in the client-server model computers. Many developments in the field of computer architectures become to provide a great benefit in the computing forms and the data transmission speed in the Internet becomes faster for the last decade. Moreover, both virtualization and tools for the use of big data are realized in our daily life. All the advances in the environment has made it easier to serve and manage their own “Service infrastructure”. Therefore, because SaaS is related to PaaS and IaaS, we can summarize the cloud computing as a large category.
In order to use the cloud service, we use the Google cloud platform. However, the server must preserve the intellectual property of the document/contents and the privacy of the users to construct a Safe and Trusted ICT environment. Therefore, our team aims to separate the own documents and contents. To enable a user to comfortably utilize the server, we develop the authentication of the services for the single sign-on (SSO). The SSO provides a property of access control of multiple related, but independent software system.
Social network service
Recently we are familiar with the communication on the Social Network Service (SNS), which provides us various abilities under the construction of social community such as to communicate with friends, to talk a chat, to share photos, organize the event, and so on.
We constructed the Social Network Service system by using open source software called “OpenPNE (Kazu-fuku2011)”. It provides a full set of functions necessary for SNS including mobile phone. Figure10(a) shows the user’s connection list and time line.
However, the OpenPNE does not have the functions to sync and share the files from all devices such as computers, smartphone, and so on. Especially, the OpenPNE cannot allow to access the specified files to the specified users.
File sharing service
File Sharing Service (FSS) such as Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud is becoming the popular service in the Internet. The tool of FSS is equipped with the function of uploading, viewing, and editing the file in easy instruction through the Internet or Smartphone.
The “ownCloud” is an open source file sync and share software and provides a safe, secure, and compliant file synchronization and sharing solution on servers that you control (Karlitschek et al.2012). We set the ownCloud to sync and share the file in cloud system.
Video streaming service
Streaming video distribution system changes the education environment drastically, because the video or the movies can be easily understood, even if we face the difficulty for the reading of the instruction manuals.
The Video Streaming Service such as YouTube is required to obtain educational effects such that a user voluntarily tries to obtain knowledge. Therefore, we use the ViMP Community Edition (ViMP GmbH2010) as an open source software.
Video conference service
For the reason of security, the video conference systems such as Skype are prohibited to use by Deep Packet Inspection (Yu et al.2006). Therefore, we must construct the service software under the original network configuration. We developed the system for video conference service by using Openmeethings (Wagner et al.2006) which can provide not only video conference but also white board, saving the minutes between person to person or in the group conference. The API of Openmeetings is developed in the Red5 Streaming Server.
Other information service
Although we can use the various web service, the corresponding urls are required to enter the system. Moreover, the user must remember the login ID and the password to authenticate each service. We developed the authentication function to realize the SSO to above web services (Padolsey2010). The iNettuts uses java script with jQuery UI library to mimic the iGoogle Interface. Figure10 shows the entrance site of our cloud system.
The user can register the own profile and picture through the smartphone application.