Is OS virtualization an end in itself? Is it both necessary and sufficient for all things Cloud and IaaS? Is it the panacea IT Operations has been looking for? From where I see it, abstracting the OS is certainly a great start, but it’s actually only 50% of the goal.  To a degree, OS virtualization is the “shiny metal object” de jure in that it’s captivating everyone’s attention. It is of course very valuable, and is causing an important inflection point in datacenter operations and economics.  But there is a less-visible, less sexy side to datacenter operations and economics that lies “below” the CPU in the stack

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The network infrastructure business is about to undergo its own fork lift upgrade. This article discusses why Infrastructure-as-a-Service is going to fundamentally change the network infrastructure market, and the software technology that' making it all possible.

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Rather than merely accepting the consumerization of enterprise IT or the “eventuality” of public clouds, why not focus much needed attention back at the network, which was once and should perhaps again be the driving force for IT and business innovation?  Dignan and Gartner make a point, but is it pointed in the right direction?

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Amazon’s ELB is an exciting mix of well-executed infrastructure 2.0 and the proper application of SOA, but it takes a lot of work to make anything infrastructure look that easy.

The notion of Elastic Load Balancing, as recently brought to public attention by Amazon’s offering of the capability, is nothing new. The basic concept is pure Infrastructure 2.0 and the functionality offered via the API has long been available on several application delivery controllers for many years. In fact, looking through the options for Amazon’s offering leaves me feeling a bit, oh, 1999. As if load balancing hasn’t evolved far beyond the very limited subset of capabilities exposed by Amazon’s API.

That said, that’s just the view from the outside.

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The term “Infrastructure 2.0” seems to be as well understood as the term “cloud computing.” It means different things to different people, apparently, and depends heavily on the context and roles of those involved in the conversation. This shouldn’t be surprising; the term “Web 2.0” is also variable and often depends on the context of the conversation. The use of the versioning moniker is meant, in both cases however, to represent a fundamental shift in the way the technologies are leveraged by people. In the case of Web 2.0 it’s about the shift toward interactive, integrated web applications used to collaborate (share) data with people. In the case of Infrastructure 2.0, it’s about a shift toward interactive, integration infrastructure used to collaborate (share) data with infrastructure.

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