One topic was virtualization. Among other things, Iwan is involved in infrastructure - he commented that for several years he has had to tell development teams "no" when they asked for a server because they already had too many under utilized machines and were running short of space and $$. But sharing environments comes with all sorts of truly awful wasted energy in coexistence.
He said that virtualization has allowed him to say "yes" to all sorts of requests.
We talked about shipping applications with the OS included in an "envelope". That basically just turns everything upside down.
I don't have a lot of experience with virtualization although people on my team do. I've followed the blog discussions and excitement around virtualization and agreed in general that it is a good. I just didn't feel any excitement about it personally.
I don't know what was said in our conversation last night that pushed me over the edge to have the "aha" moment, but I had one. "Aha!" moments are great. I've been having more then my fair share of them lately. We are living in truly amazing times.
I look forward to future beers (both virtual and real) with my new friend Iwan.
1 comment:
Beer is a great force in human communications, but like other intoxicants it can leave the user with a false sense of having made forward progress. Please remember that for these "Jars of Formaldehyde" to communicate with each other there must be holes in the lids with pipes running out of them, and messages passing along the pipes. In other words, the isolation isn't as complete as it might seem.
This is not to deny the usefulness of virtualization technologies, nor to suggest that more beers and more discussions wouldn't be a good thing. ;-)
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