Virtualization and Cloud Computing

Cloud computing makes effective use of distributed environments for tackling large‐scale computation problems on vast data set. This chapter provides an overview of the architecture of cloud computing. The layering architecture of cloud computing provides more modular design compared to traditional compute model. Depending on the business model, cloud can be categorized to be private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud. Virtualization is the key enabler of cloud computing. It provides the capability of sharing the server clusters as a pool of computing resources and the capability of dynamically mapping virtual resource to customers and applications. The chapter also discusses various virtualization technologies and focuses on the network virtualization. Many existing cloud platform uses virtualization to provide isolated compute resources. Host virtualizations such as containers have been extensively studied and widely deployed. From network virtualization's perspective, the traditional overlay network using encapsulation and tunneling is one type of virtual network.