Prediction #12: Rise of the (virtual) machines

Make it 12! Predictions and Snowfall

Might as well start with the snowfall first: another twelve inches on the ground today. We've fallen into a pattern - Thursday = storm starts, Friday = storm ends and some chunk of the day is spent digging out. Only a foot today, so maybe the weekly effect is damping out.

But on to my final prediction for 2007 - the Year of the Software Appliance.

I'm working on Pikaplanner, a lean manufacturing application that's designed to be run in a hosted environment. I have a great setup for it, with custom gems installed and a beta version of a hyper-fast Ruby virtual machine. It works great for me, but moving it to a hosting provider has proved problematic.

At this point in our malware-infested world, installing anything new anywhere is a risky proposition. Installing enterprise software can also be time-consuming: back in the day for a decent-size Oracle apps installation you would want to set aside a full week just to get the software installed.

All of these problems (custom environments, malware, and difficult installs) are remedied by the concept of a software appliance. Illustrative of the SA concept, Digium this week announced the release of it's Asterisk VOIP PBX as a software appliance. Asterisk is a terrific product -- an open source (free as in beer) IP switching system. This monumental breakthrough in cheap communications systems has seen rapid growth, limited only by the difficulty of getting linux and telephony setup and configured by mere mortals.

Enter the software appliance - a bundle that includes the operating system, all the extra packages needed, and the VOIP switch software all pre-configured and delivered to be run virtual player environment. A tricky install becomes a simple, 30-minute exercise.

This is revolutionary -- VMware (popular maker of virtualization products, recently acquired by EMC) products are generally already well-accepted in corporate IT departments, and encapsulated applications take a lot of the risk out of new software deloyments. SO ... if you want my Pikaplanner (complete with customized environment), all I need to do is package it up, lock, stock and barrel, and deliver it as a software appliance. The "tricky install" and "customer environment" problems are solved in one fell swoop.

A software appliance is completely contained within its virtual environment, so if you're worried about security, just throw the appliance away and start again!

That's really only the beginning. If you write linux-based applications and need to deliver them in a Windows-only environment, just package up an appliance and run it in a virtual space on that Windows machine.

I can barely scratch the surface here, but VMWare turbocharged the software-appliance idea with their VMWare Player, Xen is white-hot in pursuit of the same idea, and the force of it is so powerful that even Microsoft has to conform to it..

Billy on Open Source has some terrific writings on the software appliance idea. There's a lot more to discuss here, so for now I'll leave my final prediction that "2007 is the year of the software appliance."