Rambling Ken

Legos

As I talk to more people here at Sun, and nail down what'll add the most short-to-medium term benefit, as well as long-term benefit from me, I'm getting closer to a crisp roadmap.

On the way to that roadmap, I wanted to share an analogy of what I'm working towards here.

Legos.

Sun's been pretty good at shipping boxes of legos. Sometimes the boxes contain sub assemblies of legos too. They often come with an instruction sheet for building various things out of the legos, to get folks started. Legos are great, with a box of them you can build a geometric shape, a car, a robot, or a pen plotter.

But, there's also a market for pre-built blocks, cars, robots, and pen plotters. Not everyone wants to build their object. Some just want to use the resulting object that will get built, and don't have the need to customize it in ways that only the builder can do.

A term for special-purposed devices has been being used for a while, especially as it applies to software and hardware combined for a specific purpose, an Appliance. NAS appliances are a well known version of this, in fact, a group at Sun is building one of these as well. I have a consumer one at home (my personal blog details the long story of that). It does one thing, provide accessible redundant storage. It does it efficiently and quickly, in a small attractive enclosure. It cannot, however, run general purpose applications to, say, backup my iPod. Why would it? It's a NAS box.

Other obvious examples, most home firewall/routers. They've got an operating system (often a Linux derivative), and management screens. They've got a web server running on them, and sometimes a mail server. But, can I run OpenOffice on it? I think not, it's a router.

Now, there are also examples of appliance boxes that are useful, but limited by various factors. They're a playground for hobbyists. TiVo and AppleTV come to mind. But, all you have to do is check out Make magazine to find out that any ordinary appliance to most people is a playground for customization by others.

OK, so other terms seen about lately are "Virtual Appliances", and "Software Appliances" (IDC even has a definition for how the two are similar and different). In a nutshell, a virtual appliance is some set of software, wrapped in packaging that will run one one of the several virtualization platforms available: VMware, Xen, etc. A software appliance can be a virtual appliance, but it could run on bare hardware as well. This may be another way of expressing the thought here, although at present, the whole Appliance name is both overloaded, and under-defined.

What makes a Software Appliance different from a software distribution? I was at a Virtual Appliances Leadership Summit, hosted by rPath with members of many virtualization, hardware, and software companies, discussing many of these issues this week, and the answer is, well, folks are still defining their version of it.

Here's my quick and dirty definition. An appliance must, out of the box, with little to no work by the user, serve one or more functions. In addition, it must be easy, actually trivial, to:

1. Install
2. Use
3. Maintain
4. Support
   

By definition, it's not a general purpose machine, so you don't plug an install DVD into it and put more things on. It's also not endlessly customizable, we already have plenty of ways to build those systems, if that's your goal.

So, to end today's ramble, I'll leave you with this. My goal here at Sun is to take our current sets of Legos and sub assemblies, and provide a few cars and robots, a way for people to obtain and use them, and a way for customers who want these kinds of object, to create their own cars and robots. For those at Sun, I'll be doing that by utilizing what we have, not reinventing things we already do. If you're doing something that sounds like it fits it, and we haven't talked yet, give me a shout. We'll still be shipping the subsystems, that's our bread and butter today, but as software evolves to a service on top of which new companies add value (i.e. YouTube, PodShow, Fuzz), there will be an increasing market for turnkey, easily administered and supported appliance-like things.

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Posted at 06:11PM Apr 05, 2007 by kenwallich in Personal  |  Comments[1]