Cloud resource utilization

I've been thinking lately about the impact IaaS clouds are having on the IT industry and some of the more subtle implications of the model IaaS clouds have adopted. They offer companies significant benefits through pooling of resources, rapid provisioning, avoidance of capital investments and reduced operational headaches, but at the same time one has to conclude that virtual resources provisioned by IaaS clouds are only slightly more “elastic” than physical resources. For example: popular IaaS clouds support a limited number of processor and memory configurations for the (virtual) servers they provision. This means that the workload consolidation issues that exist in physical data centers remain. For some workloads Load Balancers or Grid Schedulers can be used for (virtual) server consolidation, but there is no adequate solution for workloads that in a physical data center would be consolidated using server virtualization, specifically when individual workloads are small and only require a fraction of even the smallest (virtual) server available. The costs of cloud resources are relatively high and 100% variable; for example, an EC2 server deployed 24/7/365 is about 3x more expensive than an equivalent server in an efficiently run data center. This means that finding ways to maximize the utilization of virtual resources will be essential in attracting a broader mix of workloads to the cloud. Container Virtualization can be an attractive way of accomplishing this.