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Using Linux for Cloud Computing

IN THIS CHAPTER

How Linux is used in clouds

Trying basic cloud technology

To cloud users, cloud computing means being able to request some computing service from their local computer to some server on a network, without necessarily knowing how the request is fulfilled. What makes it a cloud is how those delivering the services set up their computer infrastructures to fulfill the requests.

Cloud technology today makes it possible to view datacenters as large, fluid pools of host computers (hypervisors), controllers, storage nodes, network configurations, and many other components. You may wonder what Linux has to do with cloud computing. Well, Linux just happens to be at the heart of many of today's public and private cloud technologies.

This chapter introduces you to concepts of cloud computing, in general, and cloud technologies associated with Linux, in particular. After introducing cloud concepts, this chapter has you set up some of the basic building blocks of cloud technology: hypervisors, virtual machines, and shared storage.

After you have tried some of those basic cloud technologies, the chapter describes how enterprise-quality clouds extend those basic concepts so they can scale up to meet the needs of modern datacenters.

Overview of Linux and Cloud Computing

Cloud moves us into an arena where everything you learned in this book is being ...

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