Tying Caroline to Blackbox (or Fishworks?)
ZDNet had an interesting blog post a while back on creating a "cloud appliance" - in short, creating appliance-type hardware to run cloud computing environments. While the blog is about Google's App Engine, my thoughts went to Project Caroline. My initial response was that it was an interesting thought, but that I didn't buy it - the point was to virtualize the hardware, so why bother building an appliance?
Rich Zippel of Project Caroline has thankfully set me right:
I think this actually is right on. At the moment people don't trust anyone else with their data so they want to host a cloud computing platform themselves. I think the appliance in this case would be something like a blackbox filled with servers and running the Caroline platform. So, get the high level vritualization of the hardware, the ability rapidly create new services and get to keep the data in house.
Makes sense. Still virtualizing, still enabling rapid startup, but protecting the data from the Borg that is Google. Thanks Rich.
I think a Blackbox is likely massive overkill for the type of web services that Caroline is designed to deliver though. Perhaps an appliance based on Fishworks might be a better choice?
