VMWare Eyes Virtual Appliances to Combat Software Bloating
 

With today's operating systems ever increasing in size and complexity, a result of the wide variety of applications and usage situations they must support, maintenance of the codebase against bugs and security vulnerabilities becomes ever harder. Fortunately, VMWare thinks it has a solution; VMWare co-founder and chief scientist Mendel Rosenblum said in a keynote at Linuxworld in San Francisco that corporations should eye virtual appliances as a way to create a highly customized platform to run their applications. Instead of customizing applications to suit the target OS, Rosenblum advised, developers should consider creating a custom operating system. ""Rather than making your application run on a bunch of different operating systems, you choose one operating system. You bundle it together and you ship this thing around as a virtual appliance." And an application specific operating system doesn't just cut back on the potential number of bugs and security flaws: developers can also add features that for instance increase the software's performance.


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