When Walt Disney commented about Tomorrowland he said,
The Tomorrowland attractions have been designed to give you an opportunity to participate in adventures that are a living blueprint of our future.
First Stop, Main Street.
You can’t get to Tommorrowland directly, you’ve got to walk down Main Street to get there, you’ve got to see today, and at least have an understanding of what’s already gone by.
I remember sitting in the keynote hall for Linuxworld 07, it was the last day, and Mendel Rosenblum was going to be talking about Virtualization to a LinuxWorld crowd. I had heard him talk before at VMworld, but that was different. That was a much larger, friendlier audience. This was a smaller crowd, and they weren’t all drinking the VMware Koolaid (which is tasty by the way). They were here to hear how VMware was good for the linux ecology. I sat in the room and waited for it to get started.
He took his time, delivered a great presentation, and broke down his thoughts around the operating system, it’s role, where Virtualization could go, the direction that VMware was going, and the role that Linux could play in virtualization. I was hooked. The boiled down talk can be summarized into three statements:
- The OS is just an API.
- It’s only real purpose is to allow applications to talk to hardware, Everything else just supports that.
- Look what we could do if we don’t start with a preconception of what it’s supposed to look like.
It was like a switch had been turned on. The OS is just an API.
So where has this gone? Where is it heading?
The OS as just an API. VMware opened up the Virtual Appliance Marketplace. The idea of a virtual appliance, minimal exposure and size of an OS.
The OS as just an API. We saw BEA take a stab at this idea with liquid VM. A fat JVM with enough bulk to have hooks directly into the hypervisor. Hopefully soon we’ll see some more publicity from Oracle around what they’re doing with.
Linux gets it, the OS is an API. Ubuntu release an OS that has a small footprint, customized to run on as a VM. SUSE starts their Appliance Program, allowing users to build their own appliances, with their own applications. Both call it JeOS, or Just enough Operating System, a small OS to host applications, with just enough guts to tie to a Hypervisor, and stay updated. RPath does their thing. An entire company / framework around the virtual appliance model.
Microsoft releases their hypervisor, as an application on Windows 2008. Barack Obama causes reboots on MS hypervisors. They don’t get it. (We’ll write off MS to our Tommorowland analogy, even Disney’s vision needed to be updated every once in a while.)
But what’s next? What comes after “The OS is just an API”
Almost There!
Today, everyone who is active in pushing virtulization, is in tomorrowland. We’re all participating, either as a customers, vendors, architects, in building out the blueprint that businesses will use and adapt for their needs, and this drives where virtualization is going, and how it can be leveraged today.
The “cloud” is coming to main street, but the size and scope and it requires such a fundamental shift in how we look at computing today, that even some of the best speakers have a hard time explaining what they think it will mean. And the impacts it will have on us, the customer.
Some would say it’s here already, but I think that the full impact of virtualization has yet to been reached, so it would be impossible to say “this is how you should migrate workloads into the cloud”. Even if it just means some minor tinkering to an Internal VMware Environment, the idea of the cloud can be realized in different ways today. This is not unrelated to IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS. It’s not unrelated to the Grid vs. Virtualization disscussions, because “cloud” can and is being layered over the top of all of it. It’s the giant virtualization fabric that will encompass how we get applications to users, how we charge them, and how they choose to use the services we’ll provide, not just the bits and bolts underneath.
What if the next step is for the OS to become a fully realized distributed API? Stretched across a standardized, open, virtualization fabric.
What if this distributed API with a cloud, allowed for the migration of application workloads outside the datacenter? That would be something huh?
Welcome to Tomorrowland.
As I’ve started reading about, installing, and testing the framework that is built around eucalyptus, AppScale, and OpenNebula I’ve been having that same sense of “wow” that I had listening to Mendel, or successfully completing my first P2V. This is huge. This is realizing the power of virtualization big. Over the next few weeks I’m going to document my installation and configuration steps around Eucalyptus, OpenNebula, and Appscale. (No promises on that last one, but I’m going to give it a go.)
Note: Now, I know that some of you are going to say that VMware vSphere is going to focus on “the cloud”, and is / will be able to do some of what I’m describing above, I know, I’ve heard it too. This is an exercise in seeing “what else” is out there, and I’m going to be focused on the participation around seeing what how this open blueprint could look like.