Application development on Microsoft's hybrid cloud

You can also create service templates, which define a complete application deployment. Service templates comprise several VM templates along with operating system and application deployment scripts. There is also support for Server Application Virtualisation (Server App-V), which lets you deploy an application image to a VM, largely isolated from the VM operating system.

Microsoft’s SCVMM also has a private cloud feature. Simply having VMs in a datacentre is not enough to define a private cloud. Rather, a cloud has further characteristics, including:

• Delegation of management to enable self-service. Users in the organisation who require computing resources must be able to come to a portal or run a script that lets them create cloud resources automatically, subject to the resource and usage limitations defined by the cloud provider (internal or external).
• Resource pooling. A shared pool of resources results in more efficiency.
• Elasticity. It must be possible to add resources to a private cloud so that its capacity can be increased.
• Opacity. Cloud consumers do not need to know the details of the physical implementation.