Red Hat emphasizes that improving enterprise IT requires addressing the entire enterprise ecosystem, meaning technologies built on top of other technologies that grow over time. Examples include KVM and Xen, which not only implemented CPU virtualization but also drove the concept of virtualization and enabled the shift toward public cloud, where physical hardware is completely abstracted and infrastructure is sold as a service. Developers increasingly do not need to know where workloads run due to available tools. The cloud created a new category focused on simplicity and scalability through abstraction, but that abstraction brings loss of control. Users want both control and simplicity, and single-cloud usage risks dependency and cost escalation.
An ecosystem simply means that something is built on top of something else, and that goes on to grow. Two examples from the open-source world are KVM and Xen, both now around two decades old. It would be too simplistic to say that those two technologies realized virtualization on the CPU; Singh emphasizes that, better yet, they drove the concept of virtualization itself.
Singh has a reason for highlighting this example. He points out that the innovations in question have actually created an entirely new category: the cloud. To reiterate, we most often use the term nowadays to refer to simplicity and scalability based on abstraction, but with an accompanying loss of control. A point of conflict here is that users actually want to retain control, but they also keep demanding simplicity.
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