Come on in, the water is fine!

The last couple of weeks have validated a big part of our vision for why Elastic Server On-Demand is a critical part of the virtualization ecosystem. The growing cross-product of software components, virtualization formats, operating systems, and commensurate "glue code" is just too big for any ISV or Enterprise to handle alone.

The latest events are Sun's announcement of its Xen-based hypervisor and Oracle's announcement of their Xen-based hypervisor. We have built ESOD with this eventuality in mind, "the more the merrier".

I believe this level of competition is good for customers - but creates some challenges. There needs to be a platform where dynamic communities of developers, architects, and operations teams can codify, capture, automate, and reproduce with quality their application stack preferences.

It needs to be the customer's stack with the virtualization format of choice that meets the needs of their project or business. All the different teams using ESOD represent a collective intelligence, meaning now the cross-product of choices which do and don''t work together is not an impossible task to tackle - just one more problem that Internet scale can handle.

Watch this space for news on our support for Sun and Oracle virtualizations. That's the beauty of our community and commercial platform, a little elbow grease in one place by us, and another whole set of "your stacks" are just a click away.

Distribute Globaly, Compute Locally

Amazon Web Services announced today on Werner Vogels' weblog and at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin that Amazon S3 will extend its reach across the Atlantic. After numerous requests, costumers will now be able to store their objects in the European storage cloud. The pay-as-you-go scheme has huge upside to the alternative of paying to build and maintain reliable, secure, and scalable infrastructure. Now Europe can benefit from on-demand storage without latency issues of storing objects in the US. Werner Vogel admits there is still a lot of work to be done but this is a very important first step. Check out Vogel's blog and find out how to bucket your objects to take advantage of the European storage cloud.