1.9.1 The Promise of the Cloud

As shown in Figure, the promise of the cloud both on the business front (the attractive cloudonomics) and the technology front widely aided the CxOs to spawn out several non-mission critical IT needs from the ambit of their captive traditional data centers to the appropriate cloud service.

Invariably, these IT needs had some common features: They were typically Web-oriented; they represented seasonal IT demands; they were amenable to parallel batch processing; they were non-mission critical and therefore did not have high security demands. They included scientific applications too.

Several small and medium business enterprises, however, leveraged the cloud much beyond the cautious user. Many startups opened their IT departments exclusively using cloud services—very successfully and with high ROI.

Having observed these successes, several large enterprises have started successfully running pilots for

leveraging the cloud. Many large enterprises run SAP to manage their operations. SAP itself is experimenting with running its suite of products: SAP Business One as well as SAP Netweaver on Amazon cloud offerings. Gartner, Forrester, and other industry research analysts predict that a substantially significant percentage of the top enterprises in the world would have migrated a majority of their IT needs to the cloud offerings by 2012, thereby demonstrating the widespread impact and benefits from cloud computing.

Indeed the promise of the cloud has been significant in its impact.

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2.1 VIRTUAL MACHINES PROVISIONING AND MANAGEABILITY

In this section, we will have an overview on the typical life cycle of VM and its major possible states of operation, which make the management and automation of VMs in virtual and cloud environments easier than in traditional computing environments As shown in Figure above, the cycle starts by a request delivered to the IT department, stating the requirement for creating a new server for a particular service. IT administration to start seeing the servers’ resource pool, matching these resources with the requirements, and starting the provision of the needed virtual machine. Once provisioned machine started, it is ready to provide the required service according to an SLA, or a time period after which the virtual is being released.

1.2 ROOTS OF CLOUD COMPUTING

We can track the roots of clouds computing by observing the advancement of several technologies, especially in hardware (virtualization, multi-core chips), Internet technologies (Web services, service-oriented architectures, Web 2.0), distributed computing (clusters, grids), and systems management (autonomic computing, data center automation). Below Figure shows the convergence of technology fields that significantly advanced and contributed to the advent of cloud computing. . We present a closer look at the technologies that form the base of cloud computing, with the aim of providing a clearer picture of the cloud ecosystem as a whole. 1.2.1 From Mainframes to Clouds 1.2.2 SOA, Web Services, Web 2.0, and Mashups 1.2.3 Grid Computing 1.2.4 Utility Computing 1.2.5 Hardware Virtualization 1.2.6 Virtual Appliances and the Open Virtualization Format 1.2.7 Autonomic Computing ______ Cloud computing has its roots in several technologies and developments, including virtualization, gr...

2.1.1 VM Provisioning Process

Steps to Provision VM. Here, we describe the common and normal steps of provisioning a virtual server: Firstly, you need to select a server from a pool of available servers (physical servers with enough capacity) along with the appropriate OS template you need to provision the virtual machine. Secondly, you need to load the appropriate software (operating system you selected in the previous step, device drivers, middleware, and theneeded applications for the service required). Thirdly, you need to customize and configure the machine (e.g., IP address, Gateway) to configure an associated network and storage resources. Finally, the virtual server is ready to start with its newly loaded software. These are the tasks required or being performed by an IT or a data center’s specialist to provision a particular virtual machine.

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