Earlier this week FastScale Technology, the US startup that launched in Q2 2007 (see virtualization.info coverage), announced a new upcoming product called Stack Manager Workstation Edition.
This new tool, now in public beta, can be considered an appliance builder that uploads on Amazon EC2.
It works on CentOS and Red hat Enterprise Linux (both 4 and 5) and produces virtual machines in AMI format.
The product builds the appliances using its Composer Suite technology, which tracks how an application interacts with its OS and encapsulates in a special package (the DAB) only the relevant libraries, services, etc.
The application inside the DAB doesn’t see a stipped away OS anyway. Composer virtualizes the location of every piece, and if the application needs anything that is not inside the DAB, it will be promptly retrieved from a central repository.
There’s nothing like this on the market today. The product is even available for Windows where it could provide serious benefits.
Despite that FastScale doesn’t seem to have gained much traction in these two years.
The company has been in acquisition talk with several companies, including Sun, as virtualization.info reported in June 2008, but nothing happened.
Jumping on the cloud computing bandwagon doesn’t seem a necessary step for FastScale. It’s technology can be useful inside any data center but the company needs to figure out how to properly tell the world that it exists.
The idea of supporting Amazon EC2 side by side with VMware ESX doesn’t seem the best way to do so.