Virtualization As A Service

Amazon's web services group has been doing a range of interesting things lately for the evolution of the web.

Amongst the more bizarre Amazon projects was their Mecahnical Turk. You know it's a little bizzare when their introduction reads:

In 1769, Hungarian nobleman Wolfgang von Kempelen astonished Europe by building a mechanical chess-playing automaton that defeated nearly every opponent it faced. A life-sized wooden mannequin, adorned with a fur-trimmed robe and a turban, Kempelen's "Turk" was seated behind a cabinet and toured Europe confounding such brilliant challengers as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte.

Then there was the launch of S3 which is essentially a "storage cloud" that you can use as much, or as little, as you need.

Sun Microsystems then arrived in March in this 'cloud computing' space with Sun Grid. Sun Grid lets you access computing power at $1/CPU hour. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz reminded us that the whole point is that the Network is the Computer.

And in this area of on demand computing power, this week along comes Amazon EC2. According to Jeff (Bezos?), it uses Xen virtualization technology. Jon Udell posts a says "Wow!" and posts a brief screencam a Perl application on EC2.

This concept really takes the next step beyond 'simple' virtualization using VMWare, Parallels, Virtual PC, etc. It's really Virtualization As A Services (VAAS).... or Virtualization On Demand (VOD)... or, God forbid, Virtualization 2.0?

At Ephox, we are currently forumlating plans around our next products and there is likely to be a software as a service (SAAS) offering as part of this. Exploring innovative ideas outside of the usual datacenter options is on the cards.

Hats off to the team at Amazon for giving developers the tools for building large scale web apps without necessarily having to be based in offices in Mountain View or Santa Clara :)

tags: virtualization, amazon, ec2, s3, vmware, parallels, vmware, parallels, web2.0, web 2.0