A virtual appliance by any other name is still, well, a virtual appliance. Sometime back around June of 2005, VMware popularized the notion of creating a virtual machine package and calling it a "virtual appliance". The idea quickly grew legs and began running like the wind. Microsoft and their Virtual Server solution bought into the idea as well and introduced us to their Test Drive program near the end of 2006 A virtual appliance by any other name is still, well, a virtual appliance.Sometime back around June of 2005, VMware popularized the notion of creating a virtual machine package and calling it a “virtual appliance”. The idea quickly grew legs and began running like the wind.Microsoft and their Virtual Server solution bought into the idea as well and introduced us to their Test Drive program near the end of 2006. Now, Amazon is climbing aboard with their own version of the virtual appliance, this time called Amazon Machine Images or AMI. Amazon describes the AMI as a packaged environment that includes all the necessary bits to set up and boot Amazon EC2 instances.The company launched their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) – Amazon’s hosted, on demand virtual datacenter based on the Xen technology – with hopes of creating demand for a pay-per-use model of virtual machines. To help further market this solution, Amazon has probably been searching for yet another story to get people to try out their technology. Amazon is now asking its EC2 community members to share their AMIs with other Amazon Web Services developers. The company has even created a tutorial to help introduce members to the idea behind AMI sharing as well as the how-to’s of sharing. And for those interested, Amazon also has their own version of VMware’s Virtual Appliance Marketplace – Amazon’s Public AMIs, where members can share, download and rate each other’s AMIs.For those interested in finding out more about the EC2 community, click here. Software Development