Sun Exec: Virtualization Key To Cloud Efficiencies

By separating applications from the underlying infrastructure, virtualization is bringing the true benefits of cloud computing to the fore, according to Lew Tucker, vice president and CTO of Cloud Computing at Sun Microsystems.

In a Thursday keynote speech at the OpenSource World conference in San Francisco, Tucker discussed factors driving the growth of cloud computing and offered opinions on the future direction the industry will take.

Cloud computing is gaining steam because companies want to focus on their business and not be tasked with the drudgery of maintaining physical IT, Tucker told attendees.

Apps in the cloud are increasingly being distributed as virtual machine images -- Amazon currently offers more than 2,900 virtual machine images to cloud developers -- but that's just part of the overall explosion in the number of preconfigured images that developers can simply install and begin working with, Tucker said.

Tucker explained that in the cloud, one OS layer wraps the application while the other is a data center OS responsible for managing virtual resources and for the provisioning of virtualized containers. Virtualization pushes management of the app to the consumer, but it also allows the data center side to focus on driving down costs, he added.

"Applications are no longer just sitting on desktops and servers; they're now being presented as services, and the architecture is service-based, Tucker said. "Now you can start quantifying the real costs of resources."

Cloud computing, which covers utility computing, grid computing and on-demand application delivery, can be seen as a "perfect storm" of technology, Tucker said.

Growing broadband penetration and mobile device usage, combined with the explosion of user-created content, are fueling the need for nontraditional, highly replicated data storage technologies. But that growth has security implications that must be taken into account, Tucker noted.

"We're in a funny state where developers are now deploying apps, where that was handled in the past by traditional IT. But developers in general aren't skilled in security," Tucker said.

Sun is looking at ways to harden virtual machine containers by taking into account the need for restricted ports and a nonexecutable stack, all of which are aimed at making cloud apps more secure, said Tucker.

"This would lead to an environment where only the things that apps need are turned on, and everything else is turned off," he said.

Tweet

   

More Applications & OS