Over the last few months WMware's Steve Jin has published several design patterns around working with virtual machines in the cloud, especially vCloud. He follows a common dialogue in each published pattern which makes it easy to read and consume.
Steve's current list of patterns:
- Service VM - to provide an easy way to provision new infrastructure and application services for the cloud
- VM Factory - a standard way to create new virtual machines based on user requirements
- VM Pipeline - to provide a configurable structure for modularized information processing
- App VM - provides a packaged software stack as a PaaS platform for running applications
- Facade VM - to provide a single point of contact for a large scale system consisting of many virtual machines to view collection as a single unit
- VM Pool - to provide a mechanism for fast provisioning of virtual machines and to manage their lifecycle though the maintenance of a pool of virtual machines
- Stateless VM - to ensure a virtual machine does not carry a permanent state so that it can be easily provisioned, migrated and managed
- Aspectual Centralization - to separate concerns in large scale computing by leveraging different types of services in the cloud
As every vendor cloud implementation from public cloud, hybrid cloud to private cloud is built on a foundation solution utilizing virtual machine technology, architects and lead technologists alike need to be familiar with the basics. What other design patterns are available for working with virtual machines?