And I should learn to read your posts more closely, or at least make it clear when you inspire me to post, that I am not arguing against you, but rather riffing off your ideas.

Thanks for commenting. Definitely some worthwhile clarifications.

WRT to cloud w/o hypervisor you write

“I think that is *possible*, but in practice it is questionable whether that would be a good thing.”

And I fully agree. My point in the post was simply to assert the possibility of non-hypervisor clouds. I agree that in the current state of the industry hypervisors are a very important and practical technical building block for a cloud. I wrote:

“At the current point in time, the hardware (e.g. multiple cores, shared memory) and software (hypervisors, legacy apps) environment is such that hypervisor-based solutions seem to have an edge over those based on automated provisioning/configuration alone.”

I am not trying to push people away from hypervisor.

Bottom line: I should make it clearer when I write posts that are mostly of theoretical interest. Which is something I have a sick tendency to do a lot, as illustrated by this twitter proposal (algorithm, implementation) and posts like these (file transfer over WS-Management, long-lived Google App Engine requests, graph queries in XPath). Not to mention the OWL2ish Turing machine I’ve been toying with.

I am an egghead at heart (and soon I’ll look like one too).

I was really using your post as a starting point to discuss the seemingly popular opinion (not necessarily yours) that cloud==virtualization==hypervisor.

I do still disagree with much of your original post, at least insomuch as it says cloud does not need hypervisors. As I say, I think that is *possible*, but in practice it is questionable whether that would be a good thing.

But you were clear in your post; I was not clear enough in mine. I added an edit to try to clarify my point.

My post is 100% focused on debunking the idea that you need *hypervisors* for Cloud. I never asserted that one should try to “provide cloud services without virtualization”, just that one can do it without *hypervisors*.

I specifically stay away from the term “virtualization” and I explain why in the second sentence of the post:

In the industry, the term “virtualization” (and its corollary, “virtual machine”) is used in so many different ways that it has lost all usefulness.

That’s why I don’t touch “virtualization” in the post.

Based on the definition of virtualization used in your post, I fully agree with what you are writing. I would even go further. With the definition of virtualization that you use (one that I agree with but is not the only one floating around – ask VMWare bigots what “virtualization” is), the only Cloud that does not utilize virtualization is a http://dell.com server order form. It’s on demand in a way, but it arrives in a truck. Everything else is virtualization.