Summary

Virtualization is already taking place in most of the enterprises and service provider environments, and cloud computing in the form of IaaS is taking place to a limited extent in large enterprises and some service provider environments. Virtualization allows creating virtual (logical) resources from multiple physical resources. Virtualization can be done in compute (server) networks, router and switching networks, storage networks, and firewall and load-balancing services, and management of virtualized resources can be done using management tools such as provisioning, orchestration, and middleware tools. Cloud computing and virtualization are used interchangeably, but that is incorrect. For example, server virtualization provides flexibility to enable cloud computing, but that does not make virtualization the same as cloud computing. There are many technologies that enable cloud computing, and virtualization is one of them.

Cloud computing is the abstraction of underlying applications, information, content, and resources, which allows resources to be provided and consumed in a more elastic and on demand manner. This abstraction also makes the underlying resources easier to manage and provides the basis for more effective management of the applications themselves. Clouds can provide an almost immediate access to hardware resources without incurring any up-front capital costs. This alone will provide incentive for many enterprises and service providers to move to clouds, because it provides a quick return on investment.