But not for long. Earlier this week, I met with the folks at 3Tera to discuss their AppLogic grid system (http://www.infoworld.com/4449). It's a kissing cousin to EC2, but with a more sophisticated approach to configuring and managing bundles of Linux applications along with other so-called virtual appliances that encapsulate firewalls and load balancers. The AppLogic management console is a slick AJAX application that you use to wire up collections of these virtual appliances and clone them for reuse.

Way back in 2002, I thought (http://www.infoworld.com/article/02/10/03/021003opwebserv_1.html)Web services would be the vector for Internet-scale grid computing. It looks like I got that wrong. A Web service is a fairly general construct, but an entire virtual machine is far more general. And since Linux is the OS of choice for cloud-based virtual machines, last week's suggestion that Microsoft get cracking on portable Avalon and open XAML makes even more sense this week.