...execute in a traditional environment. This problem puts organisations in a difficult position because they must either commit to a virtualised environment, losing any flexibility to employ virtual and physical resources, or accept the inherent overhead associated with non-virtualisation-aware applications and be less efficient.
Inherent inefficiencies
Although the lack of virtualisation awareness is cited as a concern by organisations, datacentre and cloud computing providers have other ways of addressing the inherent inefficiencies of non-virtualisation-aware applications.
For example, exploiting the optimisation capabilities of modern load-balancers is one way to increase virtual-machine density and negate the impact of virtualisation on application capacity and performance.
Given that almost every cloud provider uses some form of modern load-balancing system and can easily enable these optimisation capabilities, it seems unlikely that the lack of virtualisation awareness in applications would be detrimental to cloud-computing adoption in the long run.
In fact, the ability to exploit traditional and virtual resources, thus combining the local datacentre with cloud-computing resources, would seem a boon to organisations seeking to address capacity concerns without moving their entire infrastructure to an external entity.
Also, the ability to optimise through systems required to implement a cloud computing infrastructure ensures that organisations moving to an internal cloud deployment are not forced to replace their entire infrastructure to support virtualisation-aware applications.
Negative effects
While there are certainly advantages to making applications virtualisation-aware, there are also some negative effects on infrastructure, architecture and organisational flexibility.
With other options available — options that do not restrict organisations or force them into specific architectural choices — it seems far more likely that a lack of virtualisation awareness will engender success of the cloud-computing model rather than hinder it.
Virtualisation-awareness may be advantageous, it is certainly not a requirement and whether it is more fully adopted or not is unlikely to have any impact on the success and adoption of cloud computing.
Lori MacVittie is responsible for application services education and evangelism at application delivery firm F5 Networks. Her role includes producing technical materials and participating in community-based forums and industry standards organisations. MacVittie has extensive programming experience as an application architect, as well as in network and systems development and administration.
Talkback
My only twinge about the idea of apps being specially written for one particular virtualisation platform is that developer effort then goes into than rather than making the app better for everyone else, not all of whom will be using Hyper-V.
Maybe that is one element of Microsoft's strategy...