the onda

Virtualization is the new black in the tech industry. What a handful of nerds reconstituted from the IBM 360 days at VMware, everyone wants to do now, whether it is Xen at EC2 (and all of their competitors), or KVM extensions or even Wine. Today, Eddie sent me a link to a company that looks a lot like VMware in the cloud— Xenocode— except that it's 2009 and not 1999, and people are still having pissing matches over whether the desktop is truly over and AJAX goodness is the only path forward.

Xenocode seems to be able to do per-application virtualization, wrapping your exe into a file which extracts itself into a sort of chroot for Windows. With it developers can run fully isolated Windows apps from their disks or from USB sticks, while the apps themselves think that they are running on a full host.

That's a neat trick, but the company will do you one better, as they can also stream these apps-in-a-file to a browser plug-in effectively giving you desktop-application-from-the-cloud for free.

Now I haven't used Xenocode enough to know whether it actually works as advertised, but the one thing that is clear is that we're heading into this totally virtualized Zen Zone where compute cycles will just exist in our personal fabric ready to run our various VMs for us. And whether it is an NES image on an iPhone, or a Win32 one running WoW split between that same iPhone and an EC2 instance in the cloud will not matter in a few years time when we've got enough LTE (4G wireless) to make up for our crappy networks, and seamless compute cycles for rent from many providers.

One thing is for sure: compute architectures are a-changing, probably more so than any time since x86 won. And it will be up to us to figure out what to do with them.