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Climbing on the Cloud

Posted on 8 Dec 2008 at 16:47

Jon Honeyball tries not to get too cynical about azure, finds the best of British in a high-end hi-fi kit, and breaks the iris scanner at Heathrow.

By doing this I built up a big working library of snapshots, each with a complete app test harness in place. I can now move between these VMs at lightning speed: it takes no more than five seconds to switch from one to another. This is much faster than anything you could achieve using Ghost or other disk-imaging technologies, and incomparably quicker than vaping the hard disk and installing OS and test software from scratch each time. Want to check out something on the fourth snapshot? Click and waaaaaaaaaaaait, and you're there, running live. Go to the second? Click and waaaaaaaaaaait, and you're there.

However, all these snapshots do take up lots of disk space, and VMware stores them in a hybridised file that acts like a whole filesystem. On the Mac, this vmware file can be right-clicked to open it, and you can then peer inside at the files it contains. I decided to push this technology right to the edge, so I have the base install plus 30 complete OS snapshots, each with its own app test suite contained within. This monstrous collection comes in at a rather awesome size of 219GB, which seems a trifle excessive at around 7GB per OS snapshot. I'll have to confess that I've been kicking this thing around for nearly a month, so who knows what fragmentation is happening inside? I realise that I could ask VMware to repack the file, but that would require me to remove the snapshots first, which misses the point. Still, at the end of the day, being able to swap between complete test suites, and OSes and test files, within five seconds is a level of capability that just staggers me.

And finally...

I'm indeed fortunate that the various roles I play in the mixed-up world of IT provide opportunities to see and play with a whole range of stuff years before it's released. A few misguided companies even ask my opinion about their stuff, which is brave given that I'm not known for either reticence or politeness. Occasionally, I see something that knocks me sideways, although to be honest it doesn't happen as often as it used to. Nevertheless, I still look for that tingling feeling I get in the presence of greatness, and it happened recently.

I can't tell you what, or where, or when, or who, or why, although hopefully I'll be able to show you something by the New Year. But this time round, there's no doubt this technology is going to deliver on its promise. It's going to be bigger than the first time you used a web search engine. You'll spend an hour playing with it in disbelief at its depth, breadth and brain-scrambling capability. Finally, your brain will explode as you think through what it means in the big wide world. More as soon as I can. Promise...

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