The Network is the Computer Redux

There has been a promise - which has mostly been fulfilled - that PaaS and SaaS would free customers from a variety of system maintenance and configuration management tasks they once spent lots of time and money on.

I believe that virtualization of CPU and Storage resources is ushering in a new level of efficiency for application maintenance and deployment.

A great deal of resources have been spent creating homogeous deployment envirorments but applications has asymetrical requirements.  In addition, commercial applications often have reference deployment architectures (database, security, application server, etc) that are quite different from your deployment architecture.  Even even you standardize on a vendor or architecture, there are incompatibilities and differences between versions.

Software provided as service can have much more rapid development cycles because of a streamlined deployment envirorment - they only have a single configuration to manage.  They do, however, have to management multi-tenancy and operational aspects.

What if the ISV delivered as a virtual appliance for single tenancy?  They would still have to do a fair amount of data model/deployment work for rolling changes but many operational/deployment/config related errors - and work - could be eliminated.

What is necessary for this to happen?   

- Speedier virtual machine networking.  VMware is better than KVM and VirtualBox but I've certainly seen VM to VM speed slowdowns vs. hardware switches.  

- Easier storage deployment.  How does one establish a multi-spindle database deployment envirorment for a single app in a virtualized envirorment?  

- Peer coordinating application clusters.  If two vms can share load, at a session or lower level, without a coordinating session manager beyond NAT, boy could scaling be easier.

Let me know what you think.