In his keynote at VMworld 2010, VMware CEO Paul Maritz spoke of how virtualisation is radically rewriting the computing landscape, in that the existing IT model is being replaced by cloud based on virtualisation, and that IT will increasingly focus on delivering customised applications. "This is the new stack, and we are in a transition from a client/server world to the stack of the cloud era.... One thing history teaches us is that there are winners and losers in moving from stacks. But something like this will happen if we are for it or not," Maritz said.
This is but the latest in the trend toward operating system abstraction. Since viable virtualisation technologies arrived on the scene, models and architectures have shaped to serve varying needs. From type-1 hypervisors, to virtual workspaces, to rich services runtimes, the number of virtual applications have outstripped the installed base since 2007. Now, service providers have deployed vast virtual data centres, and companies investing in virtualisation are following suit in building their private and hybrid clouds - the latter in which tiered virtual machines are being created in third-party datacentres so that companies can scale to meet demand.
As virtualisation continues to expand, software practices have had to dramatically shift in kind. As the operating system abstracted development from the underlying hardware, and interpreters abstracted away from the operating system, the latest generation of platforms now abstracts away from the gory details that once dogged development and test alike. Maritz stated how "There hasn't been a lot of development in the operating system environment for 20 years. Now, a developer working with Ruby on Rails doesn't need to care about what operating system is under the hood." I would take this a step further - a developer working with HTML5, JavaScript, RoR, Flex/AIR or the rest don't need to care about what application platforms or containers are under the hood. It is difficult not to agree with Maritz that old-style software development has no place in the new, virtualised environment. Rather, new applications are needed so that companies can meld new information flows into existing applications and meet client demand.
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