Virtualizing, Standardizing & Automating

In a Cloud environment, people expect self-service, being able to get started very quickly, self-provisioning or rapid provisioning, scalability, better billing models. All these features demands that you have all your fundamentals well placed. You cannot expect cloud to produce what a cloud is expected to produce if it is not virtualized, standardized and automated, because people expect technology that is easily scalable, portable, interoperable and self-working. This is going to drive down the cost and improve service. Three main constituents for achieving these requirements are discussed as follows-

• Virtualization: Virtualization isn’t a vague concept- you probably are already engaged in virtualization in one or other fashion. Virtualization technology is around 30 years old now. So, first define a simple definition of virtualization-“ Virtualization is an abstraction layer (hypervisor) that decouples the physical hardware (CPU, Storage, Networking) from the operating system to deliver greater IT resource utilization and flexibility.” I will go deep in virtualization some other day, for now just see how it helps in achieving above said goals. Using Virtualization one can easy allocate and dislocate resources to cloud user without any interaction of human. This property provides easy and trustable scalability in our system.
• Standardization: Adoption of cloud computing by MSB’s and SSB’s is mostly rejected due to lack of standards in cloud computing. If one MSB’s uses service of one cloud provider, it cannot change its services very easily to another cloud. So, it requires collective acceptance for going in cloud and choosing a cloud provider which is very difficult. If we can achieve Standardization, uniform offerings will be readily available from different providers on a metered basis. It is also decrease Pricing because of increase in providers.
• Automation: Cloud idea is developed and is popular because of its auto-service feature. This is back bone for acceptance of cloud computing by all fields of sciences. Automation requires Self-Service portals providing point and click access to all IT resources. Resources are provisioned on demand, helping to reduce IT resource setup and configuration cycle times.