VMware Springs Big for SpringSource

In a blog post back in May, I described why I believed a SpringSource and Hyperic combination was a good thing. In the new world of virtualized infrastructure and cloud computing, the application delivery and management approach is going to be lightweight and lean. At the time, however, I never imagined lightweight and lean would be worth $420M to VMware. While I have no doubt that a lightweight and agile approach to application delivery and management is going to replace the outdated heavy approach of J2EE and EJB, I am not quite convinced that VMware is getting in this deal what they want us to believe they are getting – general purpose operating system irrelevance.

VMware has done an incredible job abstracting the hardware away from the general purpose operating system. Now they have moved to the other end of the stack in an attempt to abstract the application away from the operating system. If the operating system is not responsible for hardware support and it is likewise not responsible for application support, then it is irrelevant, right? It is a good theory, but it is not quite true.

While the majority of application code will certainly be written in languages that can be supported by SpringSource (java, grails), there will remain lots and lots of application utilities and services that are provided by various programs that are not, and will never be, written in Java or the related languages supported by SpringSource. All of these various programs will still need to be assembled into the system images that represent a working application. And while I absolutely believe the general purpose operating system should die an ugly death in the face of virtualized infrastructure and cloud computing, I do not believe that operating systems can be rendered irrelevant to the application. I simply believe they become lighter and more application specific. I also believe that we are going to see a proliferation of application language approaches, not a consolidation to Java alone.

Acquiring SpringSource puts VMware on the path to providing not only Infrastructure as a Service technology, but also Platform as a Service technology. From what I have seen to date in the market, PaaS lags far, far behind IaaS in acceptance and growth. I have written multiple posts praising the Amazon approach and decrying the Google and Salesforce approach for cloud because the latter requires developers to conform to the preferences of the platform provider while the former allows developers to exercise creativity in the choice of languages, libraries, data structures, etc. That's not to say that PaaS cannot be a valuable part of the application developer toolkit. It's just that the market will be much more limited in size due to the limitations in the degrees of freedom that can be exercised. And if developers love one thing more than anything else, it is freedom.

VMware's acquisition of SpringSource moves them into the very unfamiliar territory of developer tools and runtimes. It is a different sale to a different audience. Developers are notoriously fickle, and it will be interesting to see how a famously insular company like VMware manages to maintain the developer momentum built by the SpringSource team.

Cloud Computing Casts Shadow on Walled Gardens

As a technology provider that helps application companies embrace cloud computing by virtualizing the applications to run on any cloud, I was a bit disappointed with Google's appengine announcement. It appears that Google is embracing the “walled garden” approach of salesforce.com and Microsoft instead of the cloud approach of Amazon. I believe that walled gardens will ultimately be overshadowed by clouds because you cannot achieve webscale computing if every application has to run on a server owned by Google.

Historically, Google has been very good about providing APIs that enable applications to access its web services independent of the computer on which they run. This is an important concept because it is often the case that an application needs to run on a particular network or network segment in order to preserve some critical aspect of performance or security. It is also important because it provides developers with the broadest choice of system and programming tools when developing or maintaining their applications. If you must program the application in the Python implementation specified by Google and run it on a Google server in order to take advantage of services like BigTable and Sawzall, a huge segment of the application market has just been eliminated from consideration (note that it is unclear to me at this time if Big Table and Sawzall can be accessed independent of appengine).

Why not simply expose a virtual machine API (such as Amazon Machine Image) along with the API for the web services (such as Amazon's S3, SQS, etc.)? Application instances that require minimal latency to Google services are provisioned as virtualized appliances on a Google server. For applications that need to run on a different network, you can provision the same system definition to that network while accessing the web services over the Internet. Write the program in any language you choose. With any set of system components that you choose.

The problem with walled gardens is that they ultimately restrict the growth of the market. While it is true that an attractive and well manicured walled garden will result in asymetrically large economic rent for the owner of the garden (witness Microsoft), the size of the market is nonetheless constrained. It seems to me that Google would reap the greatest benefit from maximizing the market for cloud applications quickly – independent of their ability to collect an asymetrically large portion of the rent from that market. Even their marketing of the current implementation of appengine indicates this hypothesis is correct – it is free. Success with cloud computing will no doubt lead to a decline in the value of the Microsoft system software franchise (the ultimate walled garden). Why not accelerate that decline with broad market capability instead of yet another walled garden (YAWG)?

Let me provide a concrete example. rPath was approached by a SaaS application provider to help them release their on-demand application as an on-premise application – without sacrificing management control of the system software. They want on-premise capability in order to meet the data security requirements of a certain segment of the market which they have been unable to penetrate with their SaaS offering. Their current application runs on Microsoft server technology, but it is written in Java so skipping out of the Microsoft walled garden was pretty trivial. We provided them with a virtualized implementation of their application, and we demonstrated how it could run on a local network atop a hypervisor, or as a variable cost implementation on Amazon's elastic compute cloud (EC2). Their reaction was so positive that they are now planning to gradually migrate their entire infrastructure from Microsoft to virtual infrastructure in order to seamlessly deliver the application via SaaS, variable cost cloud (Amazon), and local network (virtual appliance). Without changing their preference for programming language. Without sacrificing control of the system software layer.

To be fair to Google, appengine is a beta service. I have no doubt that they made compromises in architecture in order to get the service out the door more quickly. I hope they follow Amazon's lead and expose all of their great services as true web services while enabling any application to run close to those services via a simple virtualization spec such as Amazon's AMI. The faster we take the market to cloud computing, the sooner we can kill off the walled gardens through webscale shadows that deprive them of economic sunlight.