Over the past week, I’ve been looking through the various appliance projects hosted at rPath’s rBuilder project site with an eye toward what could a hosting company borrow or participate in. rPath is a company that’s building software that makes it easier to manage, deploy, and create applications that can be built as either virtualized or physical appliances.
Aside from the obvious, like the LAMP project, there are numerous appliances that fit into various vertical markets that many hosting companies are starting to enter. A company could grab a project and apply its own magic to it to fit it into its existing provisioning, control panel, and other infrastructure systems.
Another option is to utilize the pre-built virtual machines for a vertical VPS platform. The virtual machines are tuned for the application. The plans can be cheaper than the more generalized Linux VPS offerings. You could build a RIA that allows for seamless, integrated management of all applications to which an SMB could subscribe.
The beauty about the virtual machines is that some projects have VMs for a variety of systems: VMWare, Virtual Server, or Amazon. The last in the list is probably the most interesting. I could see a meta-hoster that simply builds an application that, when an order is received, grabs the latest Amazon image from the project source control and then provision it as a VM within EC2. Still, it might be pricey renting out an Amazon VM as a VPS offering.
Some of the projects worth watching, in my opinion, are those around Zimbra, SugarCRM, and Asterisk. These would make great additions to an on-demand platform that could be offered on cheap VPS plans or use the appliances for your shared platform and carve out tenants. Build on top of the three applications to create a nice, integrated platform, maybe the Linux equivalent of Unified Messaging (though I’m sure I.m missing some more in the list).
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