Page 80 - 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

Those decisions can be based on the end user’s priorities,
not the cloud’s. A business tenant of the cloud can determine
who is a high-priority user—say a regular large customer who
pays on time—and give that user more resources when he ap-
pears on the site, at the expense of customers who just browse
or those with poor credit ratings and payment practices.

Those users get moved to more heavily taxed hosts and en-
dure longer response times.
So far we’ve been examining how virtualization makes it
easier to convert a big cloud data center into a multitenant
facility, improving its ease of management and multiplying its
already powerful economies of scale. Next, we’ll look at how
virtualization also smooths the path for end users to use the

cloud.

Mobile Workload Packages:
The Virtual Appliance

Virtualization also affects the other end of cloud computing,
the end user with a workload that she wishes to prepare and
launch in the cloud. To realize what the end user does with vir-

tualization, it’s necessary to delve a little deeper into how virtu-
alization changes the software that the end user is dealing with.
The historic role of the operating system is to hear the ap-
plication’s calls for hardware services, such as an accounting
system calling for two numbers to be added together, and pass
that request for service to the hardware, which then performs
the task. The operating system understands the instruction set

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