Virtualization & cloud computing

Hey folks! How you doing?

Today we are bringing to you, two topics that it would be very interesting to discuss:

• Virtualization
• Cloud computing

These two concepts are very important in order to know how to build our datacenter, as well as which to choose if we want to lease these services. First of all we are going to present each topic and then we are going to see the differences between them. Finally the last part of the post will show the effects of using these technologies inside a datacenter.

Virtualization

Virtualization is software that separates physical infrastructures to create various dedicated resources. So, what does it mean? Firstly, we need to understand the idea of running a single operating system in one device and then, we will cover the meaning of the explanation.

Imagine a device, for instance, a laptop. This machine executes one operating system and it is posible to install and execute different programs within it. These programs are using some resources of our laptop and probably if we want to execute every application in the same operating system we will have some problems. Sometimes not all the programs are compatible. As soon as, are detected these drawbacks, before virtualization was discovered, the trend was moving to another device with a new operating system, all those programs. Doing so, will permit execute other applications without any problem. We can extract from this solution that, the more incompatible programs we had, the more devices we will need to use. Therefore, this will result in a non-desirable scenario.

Thanks to the breakthrough of virtualization, this trend changed. From then on, using only one device was possible to run more than one operating system within it. Besides, using this solution, the program which is running in one of these "virtual" parts of the device, could use all the resources without sharing anything with another application. It is very useful, as nothing else is interfering in all the execution of the app and also dissappears the need of using more than one device per program.

The main idea of virtualization is splitting the hardware of the machine up. We don't have a single dedicated operating system for one machine. We have a lot of virtual operating systems using the same hardware. Each of them had their own resources sourcing from the same device.

Cloud computing

The term cloud computing differs a little bit from virtualization, but needs it, in order to have sense. Is refered as the situation in which "shared computing resources, software, or data are delivered as a service and on-demand through the Internet". Hence, cloud computing only exists if virtualization does. Also we can extract from this definition that, cloud computing is a service. Is one of the terms used to present some services inside a datacenter. Also we need to take into account that  there are a number of other factors which separate cloud computing from virtualization. We can find self-service for users, broad network access, the ability to elastically scale resources, and the presence of measured service.

Differences between virtualization and cloud computing

Essentially, virtualization differs from cloud computing because virtualization is software that manipulates hardware, while cloud computing refers to a service that results from that manipulation.

Using one solution or another it depends on which kind of business we are going to run. If we are looking for a private cloud, a virtualization environment should be chosen.But what does it mean?

The client owns or leases the hardware and software that provides the consumption model.

While using for example a public cloud means that

The client pay for resources as he/she go, as he/she consume them, from a vendor that is providing such resources. In this solution the client is sharing the "machine" with more customers of the same vendor.

So, as we mentioned before, it depends on how the customer is focusing his/her business.

Hope this post has been useful for you. Don't hesitate on asking anything related to these topics. This is only a brief summary and we know there is a lot of things inside these fields that we haven't covered at all.

See you in the next post!