When my posting frequency drops a bit, the usual reason is that I'm flying here and yon and otherwise occupied with goings-on at some conference, meeting, or client engagement. The situation in January was a bit different. For the first time in a while, I had some decent blocks of uncommitted time. And I put those to use fleshing out and writing some longer research notes that had been sitting on the to-do list for way too long.
Two of these deal with so-called "cloud computing"--the idea that software will increasingly run in the network. These were originally planned as a single paper, but for structural and length reasons, I decided to break out the definitional piece, "Defining Cloud Computing." To tell the truth, I don't typically find formal taxonomies and categorizations especially interesting, but I thought it useful in this case to be clear about the topic under discussion.
The main research note, "The Cloud vs. Open Source," focuses on the relevancy of open source in a cloud computing world--and, especially, whether other types of protections and rights may not be more important than the right to view, modify, and redistribute source code. Tim O'Reilly has written and spoken on this topic.
At the just-concluded Sun Analyst Summit, I also had the opportunity to broach this topic with Simon Phipps, Sun's Open Source Officer. An interesting perspective that he added is that we're really talking about two different kinds of rights. One is essentially individual--the right for me to decide who can access what "data" that I "own" (whatever those terms mean exactly) and to transfer my data from one place to another. However, there's also the idea of what I'll call community or collective rights--the idea of reciprocal obligations associated with providing application programming interfaces and access.
One follow-up piece that I want to write when I have time will be something along the lines of "Why Not the Cloud?" in which I'll look at some of the inhibitors to moving computing into the network.
Finally, "The Future of the Operating System" looks at how changes in the way that we operate computers and deploy applications is starting to change how we view the operating system, a technology construct that, in important ways, hasn't really changed for decades. Server virtualization is the big driving force behind change here. However, virtualization is hardly unrelated to cloud computing--both through services like Amazon EC2 and, more conceptually, in the fact that virtualization is all about masking lower-level details from users.
These three Illuminata research notes are all available as free samples.
This is a busy week--what with SC2007 in Reno, Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, and Microsoft TechEd EMEA in Barcelona. And that means lots of news crossing my desk.
One of today's most interesting tidbits came from Microsoft. Bob Kelly, corporate vice president for the company's server and tools business, announced Hyper-V:
This is the official name of the server virtualization technology within Windows Server 2008 that was previously code-named "Viridian." Microsoft also announced Hyper-V Server, a standalone hypervisor-based server virtualization product that complements the Hyper-V technology in Windows Server 2008 and allows customers to virtualize workloads onto a single physical server.
"So what?!" you say. Everybody and their dog is coming out with hypervisors that can be either purchased as standalone products or embedded into servers. Besides, Microsoft is very late to the virtualization game; its hypervisor won't even be in the initial release of Windows Server 2008.
That may all be so, but Microsoft has a huge footprint in datacenters--and even more in the IT installations of smaller companies. Thus, however tardy and reluctant Microsoft's arrival to virtualization may be (Virtual Server notwithstanding), its plans and presence matter.
That makes Microsoft's decision to offer a hypervisor that's not part of the operating system striking, given that they have been the most vocal proponents of the "virtualization as a feature of the OS" point of view. As Jim Allchin, who headed Microsoft's Platforms and Services Division until the beginning of this year put it: Windows already "virtualizes the CPU to give processing." In this sense, VMs just take that virtualization to the next level. And, in fact, there's a long history of operating systems subsuming functions and capabilities that were once commonly purchased as separate products. Think file systems, networking stacks, and thread libraries.
Built-in-ness is clearly the big argument in favor of marrying server virtualization to the operating system. You're buying the operating system anyway, so there's no need to buy a separate product from a third-party.
Of course, Microsoft wants to keep the operating system relevant to users however much Oracle and others would like to subsume it. Thus it's hardly a surprise that Microsoft wants functions in the OS both to control them and to enhance the value of its most strategic product.
But sometimes the world doesn't work the way you'd like it to.
Separate hypervisors are a better match for the sort of heterogeneous environments typically found in enterprises than are those built into OSs.
There's also a major trend afoot to embed hypervisors into x86 servers, just as they are already embedded into Big Iron. Among the early system vendors to announce or preview intentions in this area were Dell, HP, and IBM. Embedded hypervisors pretty much trump any integration advantage that virtualization-in-the-OS enjoys. You can't get much more built-in than firing virtualization up when you turn the server on for the first time.
I expect that this style of delivering the foundation of server virtualization is going to become commonplace.
It will be a while before who wrote a particular hypervisor becomes a genuine "don't care" to most users (the way BIOSs are today). Standards for managing and controlling virtual machines are still nascent and the whole area is far too new for true commoditization. But it's the direction things are headed. Even Microsoft, however reluctantly, has now accepted this even while it simultaneously tries to keep as much control over its own destiny as possible.
[Update: Corrected name of rPath CEO Billy Marshall.]
There's a nasty little war afoot over the future of the operating system.
In one corner you have the operating system vendors.
They're building in virtualization, for example. This increases the depth of their software stack. The OS vendors present virtualization as a natural addition to existing operating system functions and a means to integrate an increasingly-common software capability.
That's fair enough. But it's also about control, especially in a world where owning the hypervisor gives you an advantage when up-selling to management layers and other value-add software in which there's real money to be made (as opposed to the raw hypervisor, which is becoming increasingly commoditized).
As we saw last week in the case of Red Hat, OS vendors are on the lookout to circumvent attempts to make their operating systems (and their brands) irrelevant. In Red Hat's case, it was to quash the efforts of software appliance makers to effectively make the OS just a supporting feature of the application.
In another corner, you have the application vendors and their fellow travelers.
Software as a service (SaaS) is one aspect of this war. Taken to its logical extreme, it may change the role of systems companies as well as operating system vendors. However, we don't need to look that far into possible futures to see the application vendor front in this war.
Take the appliance makers that Red Hat was taking on last week. Rpath CEO Billy Marshall writes: "Fortunately for all of us, 'certification' will be a thing of the past when applications companies distribute their applications as virtual appliances." It's not hard to see why Red Hat doesn't exactly cotton to this way of thinking. After all, certification is a very large part of what Red Hat sells. And the number of applications certified to run on Red Hat comprises a huge barrier to any other Linux vendor delivering its own flavor of "Enterprise Linux."
Oracle's Unbreakable Linux is a different take from a different angle, but the end result is the same. Its concept is based on the idea that, when you buy an application from Oracle, you also get some bits that let the application sit on top of the hardware and perform necessary tasks like talking to disk. Oracle has been subsuming operating system functions like memory and storage management for years; subsuming the whole operating system was just the next logical step.
So is its latest move, coming out with its own hypervisor based on technology from the widely-used Xen Project. (Xen is also the basis for the hypervisor in Novell and Red Hat Linux--as well as OS-independent products from XenSource/Citrix and Virtual Iron.)
Just as Oracle wants to minimize the role of the OS, so too does it want to minimize the role of the hypervisor (which, as I noted, itself threatens to reduce the role of the OS--got all that?). From the vantage of Redwood Shores, VMware is getting altogether too much attention. The easiest way to minimize the impact of the virtualization players? Offer Oracle's own hypervisor.
The biggest challenge that I see facing Oracle here is similar to that facing Unbreakable Linux and software appliances in general. There's an implicit assumption that people will be willing to have one virtualization for their boxes that run Oracle and another virtualization for everything else--that the maker of the hypervisor bits doesn't matter.
So far, there's scant evidence that people are willing to be quite so blase about their server virtualization. Furthermore, brand preferences aside, it remains early days for standards that handle the control and movement of virtual machines across virtual infrastructures sourced from different vendors. It's perhaps more thinkable that Oracle database and application servers might be kept independent from a general virtual infrastructure than would be the case with other, often less business-critical, applications. But, at least today, its still counter the overall trend of IT shops looking at server virtualization in strategic rather than machine-by-machine tactical ways.
As a result, I don't see this announcement having a broad near-term impact (as, indeed, Unbreakable Linux did not either, once the original raft of press stories and industry discussion died down). Rather, I see this as Oracle determined to keep making its statement, time and time again, that, someday, the operating system won't matter. That's Larry's story, and he's sticking with it.
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