The next best thing to having a monopoly is owning the standard, and if not the de facto standard, well then, by gum, a de iure standard, and there’s not a red-bloodied cloud player out there who wouldn’t thrown his grandmother under an oncoming train to be that standard.
Amazon’s grandmother looks safe for the moment, but Red Hat’s grandmother better start worrying because Red Hat’s sent its Apache Deltacloud API specification down to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) to be prayed over by the DSMTF’s Cloud Management Work Group and resurrected as the arbiter of IaaS cloud portability and interoperability – and we all know how important that’s supposed to be even if early cloud users ignored history largely because, if they waited, they’d never have gotten cloud-borne.
Anyway, the Apache Deltacloud project is an open source implementation of a RESTful Web Service API abstracting common proprietary IaaS cloud management APIs like Amazon’s and Rackspace’s.
It was started by Red Hat last September and moved to the cover of the Apache Incubator earlier this year where – although it’s kinda dependent on Red Hat’s own Cloud Engine widgetry – it’s reportedly gotten “various stages of support and participation” from Cisco, Dell, Cisco, Dell, Gogrid, Goldman Sachs, HP, IBM, Ingres, Intel, Nimsoft, Opsource and Symantec.
Red Hat claims the move make Deltacloud “the only major cloud framework that isn’t tied in some way to a single company’s proprietary code, APIs or other intellectual property.” That doesn’t mean that it isn’t to Red Hat’s advantage, or that Red Hat’s code won’t run best on the thing. Heck, portability in itself is an evangelical advantage.
It plays to the futuristic vision of people moving on-demand – presumably painlessly and regardless of infrastructure or, God forbid, dependencies – between private and public clouds with an SLA, which is what the Hatter says the enterprise and the government want so long as everything can be managed from one place. Hope they’re not holding their breath
Deltacloud is key to Red Hat’s Cloud Foundations, announced in June, which is Red Hat’s everything-we-own-tossed-into-it cloud stack
Red Hat is striking early, probably prematurely, on the standards front ahead of other open source cloud projects like the newfangled OpenStack effort organized recently by Rackspace and still in development.
So far what makes it different, Red Hat says, is that it’s conceived as a Web Service and that means:
- The API can either be offered directly by the cloud provider or by individual users running their own server;
- Client libraries can be written in any number of computer languages, and are already available for popular ones;
- The core API logic resides on the API server, enabling consistent behavior across all client libraries; and
- Support for new clouds can be added to the API without changes to clients.
Drivers for Amazon EC2, GoGrid, OpenNebula, Rackspace, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Management, RimuHosting, Terremark and vCloud are either written or in-process as is a Microsoft Azure cloud storage driver.
Of course if you can’t hoist apps up into the cloud the exercise is kinda useless so, aside from wanting to be the cloud’s interoperability bridge, Red Hat’s got an application infrastructure or platform-as-a-service (PaaS) play afoot too à la Azure, Google App Engine and VMforce that’s based around its JBoss Enterprise Middleware also part of its Cloud Foundations.
Red Hat claims to be the only company other than Microsoft capable of delivering a cloud stack consisting of an operating system, middleware and virtualization that’ll run a hybrid cloud environment.
It sees enterprises, cloud service providers, ISVs and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers using its JBoss PaaS widgetry to take existing assets and develop new applications and deploy them to a range of public and private clouds, its interoperability vision again.
The company said Wednesday that its next-generation PaaS solution would simplify the development of simple new web applications as well as complex transactional enterprise applications and integrate them into an enterprise.
To advance the scheme it’ll have a reference architecture so existing apps can be re-purposed in the cloud.
The PaaS plan involves Red Hat’s prospective cloud engine for application lifecycle management and promises to let developers use their favorite frameworks and languages, stuff like Java EE, POJO, Spring, Seam, Struts, GWT, Groovy and Ruby. JBoss Developer Studio is supposed to have a bunch of Eclipse plug-ins to deploy applications into a JBoss platform instance in a cloud.
Red Hat expects JBoss cloud images to be available through a variety of public and private clouds including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Amazon EC2 and Windows Hyper-V as well as others through its cloud engine.
Let’s remember too that VMware stole a lot of JBoss’ thunder with its acquisition of SpringSource. It converted the Spring Framework into its own cloudified PaaS solution for Java applications.
By the way, Dreamworks (Shrek) Animation is using Red Hat Cloud Foundations to build a “one of the world’s largest” private clouds for future films.