Mastering Cloud Computing

Chapter 3

Virtualization

Virtualization technology is one of the fundamental components of cloud computing, especially in regard to infrastructure-based services. Virtualization allows the creation of a secure, customizable, and isolated execution environment for running applications, even if they are untrusted, without affecting other users’ applications. The basis of this technology is the ability of a computer program—or a combination of software and hardware—to emulate an executing environment separate from the one that hosts such programs. For example, we can run Windows OS on top of a virtual machine, which itself is running on Linux OS. Virtualization provides a great opportunity to build elastically scalable systems that can provision ...