Open-source cloud frameworks: A work in progress

Among the most popular IaaS frameworks are OpenStack, Eucalyptus, and the Ubuntu Cloud infrastructure. Citrix recently announced it was making its formerly proprietary CloudStack IaaS platform part of the open-source Apache project. Gartner analyst Lydia Leong wrote in her blog that this is "big news" because CloudStack is much more stable and production-ready than the "unstable" and "buggy" OpenStack.

Popular PaaS frameworks include Heroku, Cloud Foundry (backed by VMware), and Red Hat's OpenShift, which is built on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with support for a variety of languages and middleware through the use of "cartridges."

Customers often use multiple frameworks and associated tools. One example is the use of OpenStack to provision virtual machines, and Opscode Chef to create "recipes" describing how servers should be configured, says Opscode co-founder Jesse Robbins. The further up the "stack" a platform operates, the less work the customer must do, but they also have less control over the infrastructure components, says Matt Conway, CTO at online backup vendor Backupify.

Beyond easing cloud creation, most frameworks claim to make it easier to move cloud deployments among public and private clouds to get the lowest cost and best service. For example, Eucalyptus is meant to provide an Amazon EC2-compatible API that runs on top of Ubuntu Linux (the version of Linux underpinning the Ubuntu Cloud), "so apps authored for EC2 should be transplantable to one's own data center running Eucalyptus," says Conway. "Deltacloud was an initiative by Red Hat to create a 'cloud API' to abstract your application away from vendors like Amazon, and it would proxy your requests to the actual Amazon API."

For online storage vendor CX, OpenStack provides the flexibility to use other cloud vendors besides AmazonAmazon "if [Amazon's] services become too expensive or otherwise unsuitable," says CX CTO Jan Vandenbos. Alles zu Amazon auf CIO.de