On Jun 14, 2009, at 6:35 AM, Gary Mazz wrote:
Sam Johnston's timely IaaS feature matrix brings up some interesting issues, one in particular, what are the specific features that can be included in an IaaS.
Many of the IaaS provider are also providing one or more operating systems while other are providing closer to bare metal. Is the OS part of the Infrastructure or part of the Platform ?
IMO IaaS is about flexibility and thus should provide bare metal (or virtual bare metal) so that customers can use any OS they choose. OVF seems to require this, since an OVF image can contain any OS; thus if your IaaS claims to support OVF then you should be able to run *any* OVF image containing *any* OS. I think this also requires full virtualization since paravirtualization is neither standardized nor widespread. IaaS providers can provide optional prebuilt OS images, but it shouldn't be part of the infrastructure. Wes Felter - wesley@felter.org - http://felter.org/wesley/