Cohesive Flexible Technology (FT) has announced that they will open registration to their Elastic Server On Demand's (ESOD) free Community Edition today. ESOD, discussed here earlier, is a service which allows on the fly provisioning of virtual machines for a number of different virtualization platforms.

Because they offer so many virtualization platform options for deployment, the configuration process becomes an easy mix and match of component parts for the application stack the customer desires. There are a number of these offered by Cohesive, which bundles them loosely by major product (Ruby on Rails, SOA Parts, etc), or you can upload your own custom packages and create new bundles from them.

The Community Dashboard presents an interesting picture of what the company is up to and what people are using it for. I am generally someone who looks askance at the seemingly random application of "social networking" principles to every imaginable business website, as the conventional marketing wisdom of today seems to call for, but I admit that it's intriguing in this case. Seeing other people on the site, and checking out the bundles they have put together, may provide a useful amount of cross-pollination of cloud computing concepts. It can be a hard sell to try to convince someone steeped in traditional IT build and provisioning systems to consider things from a virtualized, on-demand perspective. Seeing what others are up to in the same environment may provide some inspiration.