Something we have seen with the widespread adoption of virtualized computing platforms, be they in-house or based in the cloud, is that one of the most complicated aspects has proven to be the provisioning and management of the various machines or nodes. As noted here Monday, various companies are beginning to recognize this deficiency and offer up solutions. One of the more ambitious of those is Cohesive Flexible Technologies.

Cohesive is offering a solution called Elastic Server On-Demand, which is a provisioning system for virtual machines which can build and deploy, on the fly, VMs to VMware, Xen, Parallels, or Amazon's EC2. Customers build their own application stacks with the technologies they need, then provision and manage them with ESOD... either to internal or external clouds.

There's nothing that is restricting Cohesive to only that small set of cloud services in the long term, and like Enomalism (blogged about on Monday) their flexibility in choice of platform may be their strongest selling point. The reduced time to deployment is nice, the management features are good, but with the proliferation of cloud services that is surely coming down the pike, the ability to rapidly transition between or mix them together may be the killer app when it comes to cloud computing management.