Reading Time: 4 minutes What is virtualization and how it’s related to cloud? There are different types of virtualization levels (system, applications, networking, storage, …). But basically it’s an abstraction useful to created different contexts. Virtualization could be used as an abstraction level of a cloud computing solutions, but virtualization does not imply cloud. What is cloud (computing)? According with the NIST Definition of Cloud Computing, a cloud has those essential characteristics: