Page 86 - 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

appliance, they could strip away the unneeded parts of the op-
erating system, particularly with Linux, which lends itself to
becoming a slimmed-down system specialized to run a partic-
ular appliance. (Windows and Unix are less amenable to being
shorn of parts; they have many dependencies between their
moving parts.) Such a stripped-down operating system would

make the application run faster because the stack of all oper-
ating system code sequences and modules has gotten smaller,
and the controlling intelligence has less to hunt through to
find what it needs.
The virtual appliance can be smaller than the original op-
erating system/application combination. It can move from
point to point over the Internet faster and run faster in the

cloud, saving its owner money. This is another paradox of
cloud computing. Virtualization inevitably imposes overhead
on operations because the hypervisor has intervened between
the operating system and the hardware, adding a step in the
passing of instructions to the hardware. At the same time, vir-
tualization enables the operating system to be stripped down
and function on behalf of one specific application rather than
many. The ultimate result is likely to be, at least as expressed
by rPath founder Billy Marshall in a 2009 conversation, that

the virtual appliance sheds its overhead penalty and runs
faster in the cloud than it would if it were run unvirtualized in
its original corporate data center setting.
The virtual machine has been a concept that’s been ma-
turing since the advent of the IBM 360 mainframe in 1964.
Now it’s 2010, and all that multicore hardware is waiting for
something to do. When it’s located in big data centers in the

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