Virtual Containerization 185
AlexGr alerts us to a piece by Jeff Gould up on Interop News. Quoting: "It's becoming increasingly clear that the most important use of virtualization is not to consolidate hardware boxes but to protect applications from the vagaries of the operating environments they run on. It's all about 'containerization,' to employ a really ugly but useful word. Until fairly recently this was anything but the consensus view. On the contrary, the idea that virtualization is mostly about consolidation has been conventional wisdom ever since IDC started touting VMware's roaring success as one of the reasons behind last year's slowdown in server hardware sales."
Isn't this bad for performance? (Score:1, Interesting)
What was wrong with traditional privilege isolation in Linux systems (running processes as different users, chroot, etc)?
VM's just allow so many opportunities (Score:5, Interesting)
It's proved so useful that I'm sincerely considering doing the same for my actual WWW server so that if at any given time things go -bad- on the device I can just either roll back or transparently transfer to another machine, the latter, due to the (mostly) hardware agnostic nature of the VM setup makes disaster recovery just that much simpler (sure, you still have to setup the host but at least it's a simpler process than redoing every tiny little trinket again).
Node Locking (Score:4, Interesting)
Whatever happened to "Sandboxing?" (Score:5, Interesting)
As has been said before, we need a way to grant applications permissions to use resources. We have that, to some degree, with firewalls and apps like ZoneAlarm/LittleSnitch which ask you for permission before an application is allowed to "call home", but what about other resources -- for example, being able to access only a particular directory or install a system-level event hook which acts as a keylogger? etc.
Re:I'd say it's both (Score:3, Interesting)
Also for QA. (Score:4, Interesting)