Cluster of Virtual Servers don’t form Cloud!
Sep 2, 2018 · 2 min read
The differences between the cluster of virtual servers and private cloud are so subtle that even if someone uses these terminologies interchageably then it is no wonder! Despite the fact, the distinction is clear.
Let's list out a few of them -
- Virtualizaton is a technology breakthrough whereas cloud (in general) is a business model or a methodology that leverages virtualization.
- The cluster of virtual servers might have automation scripts and orchestrators to automate the workflows, to manager & monitor the resources all by itself. Yet, there will be atleast one person solely responsible to talk to the hypervisor to take care of all the individual virtual servers in the cluster. Whereas, cloud has APIs that talk to the hypervisor for all sorts of resource management and other configurations; thus providing what we call today as - self service portal. Thus, anyone can go ahead and setup the environment as needed.
- Speaking about the deployment models, for instance let's say Platform as a Service. One would not have a quick deployment of some platform X on a new virtual server unless otherwise he has a snapshot or an image of that. Whereas in cloud, which is a template based deployment and with the introduction of the Open Service Broker APIs (which is a multi-vendor project to standardize how services are consumed on cloud native platforms across service providers) deployment across different deployment models is easier and faster.
- Speaking about the scalability of both virtual servers and the cloud; mostly in virtual servers the resources are scaled up (adding resources to a system that is managed by a single OS to handle the demand by itself) and mostly in cloud, the resources are scaled out (where you spin up more virtual resources and disperse the demand among them). Though, we can scale in anyway we need; I am mentioning about the usual behavioural aspect.
To conclude, we can say that virtualization goes ahead and makes abstraction of the hardware (or infrastructure that could include storage, compute and networking). Whereas cloud goes ahead and makes an abstraction of virtualization itself.
Thanks & regards,
Teddy Winters(Samarth Deyagond)
