Wednesday April 19, 2006

Not sure if many of you are aware of this, but Sun has Dynamic Infastructure for Web Services. The idea (in marketing speak) is to provide an agile web infrastructure. Think automation and virtualization. I am just now getting a chance to work with the technology, although right now I am doing some periphery work. I (obviously) have quite a bit of virtualization experience with Zones, although I have used other technologies as well. But dynamic infrastructure is different. It includes not only the OS and hardware, but application containers and the applications themselves.

The customers I have worked with over the years maintained fairly rigid environments. "This server runs this application". "These servers run these applications". "Our department purchased these servers out of our budget so they run our applications." It has been like this for over a decade now. The benefit of Open Systems and commoditization is that they have delivered the ability to control one's own destiny. The problem with Open Systems and commoditization is that they have delivered the ability to control one's own destiny. In any given organization, dozens of (different) destinies have emerged. At the infrastructure layer, Dynamic Infrastructure is tackling the stovepipe problem. In an oxymoron-ish(?) kind of way, Dynamic Infrastructure drives consistency. It's awefully hard to have an application grid if every node in the grid is different ...

The move to virtualization is enabling a more dynamic infrastructure, and I wonder how long it will take customers to move from "these applications run on these virtual servers" to "our applications run somewhere on this grid". Virtualization is about to hit mainstream, if it hasn't already. Virtualization doesn't drive consistency. IIMHO, it won't take that long for customers to move from virtualization to a dynamic infrastructure. Vendors, like Sun, are working hard to create the enabling tools and best practices to make it all happen.