Page 84 - 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

piece of hardware, a business application gains mobility and
the chance to thrive in the cloud. Today the primary cloud of
choice is EC2, running virtual machines as Amazon Machine
Images. Tomorrow it may be any of the dominant virtualiza-
tion formats, including VMware’s Virtual Machine Disk for-
mat (VMDK) or Microsoft and Citrix Systems’ Virtual Hard

Disk (VHD). Clouds are being built to accept virtual appli-
ances in those and other formats.
If the end user has registered with the cloud and has a
credit card account, then the workload will be accepted and
automatically run. Without human intervention, EC2 can ex-
ecute this process, apply its automated billing system to charge
the user’s account, and send the user notice that his job has

been completed and is stored in the Amazon S3 storage loca-
tion that he previously rented.

Virtual Appliances

A virtual appliance is an application and operating system
combination, looking for a suitable hardware location in
which to run on the Internet. It’s tailor-made for the cloud.
How complicated is it to build a virtual appliance? Chances

are that a developer who is skilled in the conventions of Web
services and the virtualization world can do it today, and any-
one with scripting language skills or basic programming skills
has a good shot at completing the process. Those who are will-
ing to can study the online information available and use the
free tools available, such as rBuilder from rPath, to help the pro-
cess along.

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