Brian Berliner wrote a flattering entry about 3tera recently, comparing our capabilities with EC2 and postulating about running AppLogic in front of EC2.

I certainly appreciate the comments about our system, but I think Brian’s bought into a common misconception that you can layer provisioning and higher level management systems and get the result AppLogic offers. It’s such a popular idea, in fact, that as I wrote once before I know of almost a dozen companies that tried to build something similar to EC2 and failed.

Virtual machine managers have their place, and there’s quite a few companies building them. However, trying to manage a large application by managing virtual machines is like trying to drive a car by manually firing spark plugs, pulsing the brakes and setting fluid flow levels to the engine. It doesn’t scale.

AppLogic provides an unprecendet level of simplicity in deploying, scaling and replicating distributed applications precisely because we DON’T layer the management in that way. Instead, our distributed kernel resides on all servers throughout the grid, creating a “complete” virtual environment for software. This means applications require absolutely no modification to code or configuration no matter how many copies you run or where in the world you run them.

So, while I can understand Brian’s desire to see AppLogic with EC2’s resources behind it, the architectural changes required might eliminate the features that attracted him to AppLogic in the first place.