Tutorial Blog 4: Virtualization and Cloud Computing

Hello everybody,

Virtualization (Source: www.techwench.com)

This is my final tutorial blog post and it is going to be about virtualization. What is virtualization? Very generally speaking, it means creating something in a virtual form rather than in an actual form. For example, there are software programs that virtualize the existence of hardware. Daemon Tools for instance, is a program that can virtualize a hard drive on your computer, e.g. a DVD drive. It will make your computer think that there is another drive when in fact, there is not. There are many forms of virtualization like hardware-, storage-, or network virtualization among others. One increasingly important and very interesting concept of hardware virtualization, also called platform virtualization, is cloud computing. I have dealt with that topic before at my home university and I am going to tell you a little bit more about this in the following section.

Cloud Computing (Source: http://www.cloudup.net)

Cloud computing is a concept that most of us already deal with and we are very likely to deal with it a lot more in the future. The concept is getting ever more important and companies are constantly evaluating how they can benefit from it. In essence it encompasses any service used over the internet that extends the existing capabilities of your IT system in real time. So for example, Software as a Service (SaaS), means that someone or some company, uses a software over the internet without actually having it on the computer. A service provider stores the software on its servers and offers it for use in real time to many people for a fee. The benefit for the customer is that no investment in necessary resources is needed and for the provider it only means maintaining one application for many people. There are obviously scale economies and everybody benefits. Watch the following video to get more insights on the topic:

Dropbox logo (Source: www.dropbox.com)

Another popular example that gets increasing attention from many people and especially students is a website called www.dropbox.com. On this website, you can download a small client software, that enables you to get access to your own personal webspace, that you can use and access from anywhere with any computer, and share with other people. It appears on your computer as just another folder that looks and behaves like any other folder but actually it is on the server of the company. So, you can put files in the folder, copy them from the folder and share the whole, or parts of the folder, with other people. The benefits are obvious again, you can have a shared folder with many people that is updated in real-time. For example, you can share documents with other students that you are working on together as part of e.g. a group project. Instead of having to send each and every file around again and again via email, you can just share a dropbox together. You even get a notification on your statusbar when someone made a change. If you can think of an occasion where you could benefit from this kind of software, you should definitely try it.

Here is another very nice video about cloud computing:





So, I hope you found today's topic interesting. Of course, this is a very complex topic that needs more explanation to fully understand it but I hope I could give you a first insight and that I have motivated you to look deeper into it.

Thank you for reading!

Sources:
http://www.techwench.com/myths-legends-for-virtualization-buffs-to-break/
http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/what-cloud-computing-really-means-031?page=0,0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
https://www.dropbox.com/
http://www.cloudup.net/why/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae_DKNwK_ms
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJncFirhjPg