The cloud wasn’t a bad place to be after all, so this week I started taking classes on cloud computing, I must admit in the first class I realized how little I knew about cloud computing, No that was a lie, absolutely everything was alien to me but it didn’t take long before the wonderful trainer(I’ve decided to take out her name, since I do not have the authorization to include it) explained every term that was fundamental to cloud computing, and so for my lovely readers the proceeding paragraphs will give as much detail of what I grasped from the class. At the end of this discussion readers should be able to understand what cloud computing means as-well as its benefits, what Virtualization means and what makes Virtualization feasible and lastly you should be able to understand the meaning and types of Hypervisors, let’s get started.

Cloud computing is the process of delivering on-demand services to users on a pay-as-you-go bases. In other words, Cloud computing is the process of making available computing, storage and processing services to customers at a cost efficient bases. Some important benefits of cloud computing are; It’s cost-efficient as it adopts the pay-as-you-go bases which means that the less you use the less you pay and the more you use the more you pay, cloud computing provides Data Security for users, cloud computing strips away the need for an in-house management team and so on. It’s important to note that these services provided by Cloud computing is made possible through Virtualization.

Virtualization is a technique that provides virtual storage, processors and allows for the use of virtual machines in a single physical machine. Virtualization can only be feasible with the help of a tool known as Hypervisor without which virtualization is not possible. Hypervisor is a software that’s used to run, create and manage virtual machine(s) on a single hardware.There are two types of Hypervisors namely: Type 1 Hypervisor and Type 2 Hypervisor. Type 1 Hypervisor is a type of Hypervisor that’s installed directly on the server this is why it’s also known as bare metal, example of a Type 1 Hypervisor are; ESXi vmware, Red Hat Virtualization Enterprise and kvm. While Type 2 Hypervisor is such that a host is installed in-between the server and the Hypervisor. Example of a Type 2 Hypervisor is Oracle Vbox .

Notice how each of the terms discussed above are all linked to the other? in my next post I’ll be explaining what a virtual machine(vm) is and how it relates to cloud computing.