Intent
Ensure a virtual machine does not carry a permanent state so that it can be easily provisioned, migrated, and managed in the cloud.
Also Known As
Disposable VM
Category
Behavioral
Motivation
Virtualization is the cornerstone for cloud computing, especially at the infrastructure level. With many virtual machines created, managing them becomes a big challenge.
Among these challenges are system provisioning, backup, archiving, and patching different virtual machines. These administrative tasks take lots of CAPEX and OPEX.
We need a better way to architect applications for the cloud.
Solution
Making a VM stateless solves a lot of problems. For one thing, you force applications to save data outside of the virtual machine. No longer do you need to back up the virtual machine – only the data. It also makes the system provisioning easier without differentiating the different instances. When the stateless VMs crash for whatever reasons, you don’t lose much. Just add a new virtual machine and voila!
