Page 114 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

that environment has been kept separate from the business’s
data center production systems, which must be protected
from interruption at all times.
So if an IT manager is already operating a virtualized envi-
ronment, can he just ship his virtual machines off to the cloud
to run there? In a few scenarios this would work, but today the

handshake is harder to execute than that. One of the most
commonly used clouds is Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud
(EC2), but it runs virtual machines in a proprietary virtualized
file format called Amazon Machine Images (AMI). Amazon
wants you to package up your workload in its proprietary AMI,
not in a more common format that you may already be work-
ing with internally, and send it to EC2 ready to go. So this

handshake idea between clouds still involves some coordina-
tion steps.
One company, rPath, that automates the building of virtu-
alized workloads can package your application and operating
system as an AMI and send it to EC2 through its free down-
loadable tool, rBuilder. Elastra and RightScale can also handle
the task. Other companies are sure to supply the same service
soon. You can also do it yourself with the tools that Amazon
makes available at its Amazon Web Services site.

There are additional ways to build out a private infra-
structure as if it were designed to work with a public cloud. If
you build applications equipped with the Eucalyptus Systems
application programming interfaces to run in your private
cloud, they will work on premises in the same manner as they
would if they were sent off premises to EC2. They will load

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