OpenStack vs. Amazon and Eucalyptus Clouds
When Amazon and Eucalyptus finally announced plans to partner on cloud computing, the big winners were cloud integrators seeking to move workloads between on-premise IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and Amazon Web Services. But ultimately, Talkin’ Cloud believes Amazon and Eucalyptus were reacting to OpenStack — which is available as both an on-premise or public cloud platform.
Eucalyptus has always positioned itself as an Amazon-compatible cloud computing platform for on-premises workloads. Now, Amazon is publicly confirming that Eucalyptus compatibility and promising more joint work.
According to a joined announcement from Amazon and Eucalyptus, the relationship:
“enables customers to more efficiently migrate workloads between their existing data centers and AWS while using the same management tools and skills across both environments. As part of this agreement, AWS will support Eucalyptus as they continue to extend compatibility with AWS APIs and customer use cases. Customers can run applications in their existing datacenters that are compatible with popular Amazon Web Services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).”
No doubt, the Amazon-Eucalyptus relationship is good news for CIOs and cloud integrators — two audiences who want to make sure public cloud and private cloud investments don’t require completely different architectures.
The Real Showdown: OpenStack vs. Amazon
But what drove the Amazon-Eucalyptus relationship to happen right now? The simple answer, according to Talkin’ Cloud, has to involve OpenStack — the open source cloud platform promoted by Rackspace, NASA and more than 100 other partners. OpenStack is designed for public cloud use (an Amazon alternative) and private cloud use (a Eucalyptus alternative).
In recent weeks, HP has quietly indicated that the HP Cloud strategy will leverage OpenStack. And Dell has expanded its OpenStack efforts from North America into Europe and Asia. The Dell OpenStack offering will run on the open-source Ubuntu operating system, promoted by Canonical.
Dell joined the OpenStack community at its inception. Last month, Talkin’ Cloud reported that Dell, along with HP, Rackpsace and NTT, rolled out TrySpace, a free sandbox for developers that runs on OpenStack.
Also in February Dell founded its first-ever software group, headed by former CA chief exec John Swainson, leading to speculation about forthcoming cloud services and systems management acquisitions.
And here at Talkin’ Cloud, we will keep you posted about the ongoing showdown in the cloud between AWS and OpenStack.
Additional insights from Joe Panettieri.
