Page 85 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

VIRTUALIZATION C HANGES EVERYTHING

The question might be, who will turn into skilled builders
of virtual appliances? In fact, rPath is a firm that specialized in
creating them, but the skill is unlikely to be limited to any par-
ticular entity for very long. Rather, it’s going to become a gen-
eral skill wherever expertise in an application teams up with
expertise in the operating system that runs it. Today such ex-

pertise is present on many IT staffs, whose members assign sys-
tem administrators to manage a few servers running particular
applications and operating systems. This is a labor-intensive
approach. In the future practice of cloud computing, such
skills at one company might be recognized by others and not
duplicated elsewhere. Instead, many other companies might
adopt skillfully produced virtual appliances for a small fee. Vir-

tual appliances are a way of capturing the best expertise avail-
able and sharing it broadly, as opposed to every IT staff trying
to produce its own. The main point is that virtualization plus
cloud computing means that the productivity of the IT staff
can be multiplied, if it is managed right. Develop the in-house
expertise that you really need to run proprietary processes,
and shop for other expertise that’s available elsewhere. A
smart builder will strip the operating system down to only the
parts needed by the application.

Up to this point, Windows, Unix, and Linux have been
general-purpose operating systems, needing to be able to meet
the needs of thousands of different applications. Each oper-
ating system is loaded with features and functions that allow it
to cover the whole gamut of potential application needs. What
if the operating system could be reduced to only what a par-
ticular application needs? If the best experts built a virtual

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