[occi-wg] Opinion Poll: IaaS or PaaS ?

[Randy Bias]

On Jul 3, 2009, at 7:52 AM, Edmonds, AndrewX wrote:

> Regarding:
> "I do not want to split hairs, but I am interested (from a customer  
> perspective) to be able to deploy arbitrary OS-images inside my  
> virtual machine, so the OS is not part of the service offered by the  
> Iaas-provider."
>
> The OS selection may have dependencies on the IaaS owing to hardware  
> architectures it supports (i386, x86_64, PPC, MIPS etc) so it may  
> not be possible to run arbitrary OS that assume a particular  
> h.architecture. Currently the only sure way to guarantee arbitrary  
> OS deployment could be the provisioning of instruction set emulation  
> within a hypervisor. Other than that as a simpler solution, the IaaS  
> provider would have to state what hardware architectures it could  
> support (though would limit arbitrary OS deployment).


I'm not sure this is true.  Clearly x86 has 'won' at this point.  You  
can certainly come up with edge cases, but for the vast majority of  
the market place no-x86 platforms don't matter.

The bigger problem is that hypervisor variance between providers means  
that it's not as easy to simply upload any Xen or VMware image.  You  
actually need to match hypervisors closely AND make sure the  
appropriate paravirt disk/net drivers are installed into the image  
before upload (if possible).

Alternatively, the provider could dynamically convert images on the  
fly, but this is a non-trivial capability that is multiplicative in  
terms of the number of configurations that would need to be supported  
to be useful to everyone.

Still, you could get a lot of traction just doing VMware -> Xen in PVM  
or HVM mode.



--Randy


Randy Bias, Cloud Strategist
+1 (415) 939-8507 [m], randyb at neotactics.com
BLOG: http://cloudscaling.com

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