Hybrid cloud wizards: CloudVelocity and Ravello Systems

In the beginning, there was one block of bytes that was called "the application." Perhaps you toggled it into the front panel of the computer, perhaps you handed someone a deck of punch cards, or perhaps you dragged a single EXE file into your favorite folder. But there was one thing that was the application -- one tangible, immutable, unopenable thing -- and it was relatively easy to move or duplicate. Those days are ancient history now. Today's applications are multilayered, multitiered, service-enabled, and often as dependent on a certain server cluster as on a specific operating system version. Naturally, even as "the application" becomes more and more complex, we want to make it more and more portable. It's no longer enough to migrate the virtual machines from server to server. Now we want to move the app from one data center to another, or from the data center to Amazon EC2.