James Duncan
I'm not sure that anyone from Fotango has ever blogged about the plan for Zimki. I know we've talked about it at conferences, but I thought I'd write it down.
First of all, what is Zimki now? Its a utility application platform. You build your Zimki application and we host, manage, scale and back it up. Rather than paying a subscription or a service fee your application consumes resources on one of 3 meters – bandwidth, storage, and operations in the virtual machine. Basically, the more of the resources you consume, the more you pay - and of course, vice versa.
This is a nice model, because it means you don't need to invest in hardware or hosting to get your project of the ground. You can simply focus on the value-added bit.
However, there is the question of lock-in. People don't want to be tied to a particular provider of a service and they certainly don't want to be left with nothing should that service vanish. To answer that we're planning to open source the platform, the portal, and the billing engine. The main component we're building to facilitate this is the federated fail-over component.
The idea is this: you're a developer and you want to install Zimki on your machine in your basement. You build your application and all of a sudden it becomes wildly successful. Rather than having to scale the application yourself you can enter into an arrangement where your application picks itself up, and moves itself to the main Zimki cluster that we run. Once the demand goes down, your application moves back. You simply pay for the resources you consume on the main cluster as you need it. We're providing the full scope of the platform (billing, etc) in the hope that other providers will pick up the system and provide their own Zimki clusters.
Anyway, that gives a brief overview of what we are doing, what the open source route is, and why we are doing it.
