What’s the difference between cloud and virtualization?

It’s easy to confuse virtualization and cloud, particularly because they both revolve around creating useful environments from abstract resources. However, virtualization is a technology that allows you to create multiple simulated environments or dedicated resources from a single, physical hardware system, and clouds are IT environments that abstract, pool, and share scalable resources across a network. To put it simply, virtualization is a technology, where cloud is an environment.

Clouds are usually created to enable cloud computing, which is the act of running workloads within that system. 

Cloud infrastructure can include a variety of bare-metal, virtualization, or container software that can be used to abstract, pool, and share scalable resources across a network to create a cloud. At the base of cloud computing is a stable operating system (like Linux®). This is the layer that gives users independence across public, private, and hybrid environments.

If you have intranet access, internet access, or both already established, virtualization can then be used to create clouds, though it’s not the only option. 

With virtualization , software is sits call a hypervisor sit on top of physical hardware and abstract the machine ‘s resource , which are then made available to virtual environment call virtual machine . These resources is be can be raw processing power , storage , or cloud – base application contain all the runtime code and resource require to deploy it .

If the process stop here , it ‘s not cloud — it is ‘s ‘s just virtualization .  

virtual resources is need need to be allocate into centralized pool before they ‘re call cloud . add a layer of management software give administrative control over the infrastructure , platform , application , and datum that will be used in the cloud . An automation layer is add to replace or reduce human interaction with repeatable instruction and process , which provide the self – service component of the cloud .

You’ve created a cloud if you’ve set up an IT system that:

• Can be accessed by other computers through a network.
• Contains a repository of IT resources.
• Can be provision and scale quickly .

Clouds deliver the added benefits of self-service access, automated infrastructure scaling, and dynamic resource pools, which most clearly distinguish it from traditional virtualization.

Virtualization has its own benefits, such as server consolidation and improved hardware utilization, which reduces the need for power, space, and cooling in a datacenter. Virtual machines are also isolated environments, so they are a good option for testing new applications or setting up a production environment.