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rPath demoed their virtual appliance management system at Monday's AWS Meetup. What they do is help you build a generic virtual machine image deployable on Amazon, VMWare, Xen and other targets. The idea is to build your software application independent of the underlying operating system and deploy it in your own or someone else's datacenter without worrying about all the details.

To put their service in context think of rPath as how you build, deploy, and upgrade images and someone like Right Scale has how you can run and managed a cluster of deployed images.

One stumbling block of the the great march towards virtualization is the relatively poor performance of resource hungry applications like databases. We are told to develop and test using VMs, but deploy without them. Which kind of sucks IMHO. Maybe better virtualization technology can remove this split. This paper talks about a different approach to virtualization called "container-based" virtualization that can reportedly double the performance of traditional hypervisor systems like Xen. It does this by trading isolation for efficiency. Rather than maintaining complete isolation between VMs the container approach shares resources between VMs and thus gives higher performance while still guaranteeing strong fault, resource, and security isolation. It's yet another battle in computing's endless war of creating and destroying abstraction layers. I learned a lot from from this paper because of how it compared and contrasted traditional hypervisor and container based virtualization strategies. Good job.