In the recent Amazon AWS Newsletter, they asked the following:
Some customers have asked us about ways to easily convert virtual machines from VMware vSphere, Citrix Xen Server, and Microsoft Hyper-V to Amazon EC2 instances - and vice versa. If this is something that you're interested in, we would like to hear from you. Please send an email to aws-vm@amazon.com describing your needs and use case.
I'll share my reply here for comment!
This is a killer feature that allows a number of important activities.
1. Product VMs. Many suppliers are starting to provide third-party products in the form of VMs instead of software to ease install complexity, or in an attempt to move from a hardware appliance approach to a more-software approach. This pretty much prevents their use in EC2. <cue sad music> As opposed to "Hey, if you can VM-ize your stuff then you're pretty close to being able to offer it as an Amazon AMI or even SaaS offering." <schwing!>
2. Leveraging VM Investments. For any organization that already has a VM infrastructure, it allows for reduction of cost and complexity to be able to manage images in the same way. It also allows for the much promised but under-delivered "cloud bursting" theory where you can run the same systems locally and use Amazon for excess capacity. In the current scheme I could make some AMIs "mostly" like my local VMs - but "close" is not good enough to use in production.
3. Local testing. I'd love to be able to bring my AMIs "down to me" for rapid redeploy. I often find myself having to transfer 2.5 gigs of software up to the cloud, install it, find a problem, have our devs fix it and cut another release, transfer it up again (2 hour wait time again, plus paying $$ for the transfer)...
4. Local troubleshooting. We get an app installed up in the cloud and it's not acting quite right and we need to instrument it somehow to debug. This process is much easier on a local LAN with the developers' PCs with all their stuff installed.
5. Local development. A lot of our development exercises the Amazon APIs. This is one area where Azure has a distinct advantage and can be a threat; in Visual Studio there is a "local Azure fabric" and a dev can write their app and have it running "in Azure" but on their machine, and then when they're ready deploy it up. This is slightly more than VM consumption, it's VMs plus Eucalyptus or similar porting of the Amazon API to the client side, but it's a killer feature.
Xen or VMWare would be fine - frankly this would be big enough for us I'd change virtualization solutions to the one that worked with EC2.
I just asked one of our developers for his take on value for being able to transition between VMs and EC2 to include in this email, and his response is "Well, it's just a no-brainer, right?" Right.
