Cloud Virtualization with AWS

Importance of Virtualization in the Amazon EC2 Cloud

Notes:

• According to Tech Target (2017), the “Virtualization is the creation of a virtual, rather than actual, version of something.”

• The concept of virtualization goes back to 1960s, but it was popularized by VMWare in 1999 when it was introduced to cheap Intel® hardware, which allowed anyone to virtualize a traditional computer with all its resources.

• A good example of the virtualization of Amazon AWS services is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which is essentially an IaaS service that provides virtual servers based on the Xen hypervisor.

• The architecture of EC2 host virtualization: It acts as a virtual machine manager that sits on top of the host system where all of the customer virtual machines run.

• Another critical part of the entire process of virtualization in Amazon EC2 is Amazon Machine Image (AMI), which is also a virtual appliance. However, AMI is mainly responsible for creating on-demand virtual machines within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) would not exist without the virtualization which is right at the core of IaaS cloud model and the EC2 implementation at Amazon.