Amazon Web Services

Rackspace opens cloud APIs to the masses

Speaking at the open-source hippie lovefest OSCON today, Rackspace made good today on last week’s report that it would open-source its APIs.

Rackspace released the API specification under the Creative Commons license. Source for the software used by the APIs is under the MIT X11 free software license. Find it at http://github.com/rackspace and start your own cloud.

Speaking from OSCON, Rackspace’s Erik Carlin said the company would maintain the code in traditional style.

“The intention was to open it up — we’d love to get to the point where we have external committers,” said Carlin. Currently, Rackspace is the only commiter (an entity that can make final changes to any open source project) for the code that’s been released. Carlin said Rackspace wanted to steer a “canonical set of bindings” on top of the project but looked forward to seeing what developers would do with the project.

“I hate to create our own interface and add to the [plethora of cloud APIs], but there was nothing we could embrace,” Carlin said. As it stands, the proliferation of both open and closed cloud interfaces has been an impediment to cloud computing adoption, he said.

Going forward, Carlin said he hoped to see standards emerge that will prune out the thicket of cloud technolgies and specifications, and said Rackspace will jump all over an open standard when it emerges.

Asked why Rackspace built its interface around webby ReSt instead of XML-y SOAP, like Amazon, Carlin said there was a trend toward web interfaces on the front end. Furthermore, there are plenty of other aspects to a cloud than just the user screen, he said. For example, issues like competing virtual machine formats and management specs still need to be hammered out.

“APIs are only half the battle,” he said.

Citrix and Amazon hop into mindbending infinite-loop bed together, offer virtualizing of virtual servers in virtualized cloud

We’re sensing someone had an office pool going on “alliteration they could get away with” for this slug line: “Citrix Announces Citrix C3 Lab Built on Amazon Web Services to Connect Cloud Computing to the Corporate Datacenter”.

Anyways, what the mess of ess’ and clatter of consonants means is that Citrix, as part of its big show this week is announcing their Citrix’ XenApp software is now available for rent, from AWS, to run Citrix servers on Amazon’s cloud.

C3 stands for Citrix Cloud Center, their management suite for IaaS providers.

That’s the Citrix Citrix Cloud Center Lab, for those who collect poorly thought out product names.

The brain-pain part comes from the fact that Amazon itself runs its cloud on Xen, so a customer of Citrix Citrix would, technically, be using XenApps to use Xen virtual machines to manage and deploy public cloud resources to their customers as a customer using public cloud resources running on Xen virtual machines.

Hey, that may be great and just what C3 users want and it may work just fine, but it’s a hell of a rabbit hole to send your data down, ontologically speaking. We’re not prejudiced, we’re just trying to keep up.

Also, according to the article published today by SearchEnterpriseDesktop.com News Director Alex Barrett, you’ll be able to do it all from your iPhone. I think they should call the app, “DRINK ME”, but no-one reads anymore, they’ll never get it.

This is doubtless targeted at developers who want to play with Citrix distributed computing offerings, and the odd IT shop that wants to offer Citrix AND call itself “cloud” and can’t afford its own data center.

Really, though, it’s just another way of proving that Amazon’s cloud model is still the top of heap. Oracle, IBM, now Citrix, and others are essentially opening Amazon storefronts, only it’s buzzword-friendly grid computing instead of baby clothes and lawn sprinklers. Amazon doesn’t care- they have a two and a half year leap on everyone else wanting to offer public cloud instances, the best distribution channel extant and plenty of headroom. All they have to do is make space, keep the lights on, let their little playfriends from the middleware/manageware classroom play in their pool, and rake in the dough.

I’ll scrape together some time soon and poke around, see how good a job Citrix has done making this work and post some screenshots and an update in a day or so. Just a head’s up, ladies and gentlemen: I may never been seen again.

EUCALYPTUS sprouts business shoots

In what is surely a contender for the most-complicated backronym of the ages, the Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs to Useful Systems, first developed at Middleware and Applications Yielding Heterogenous Environments for Metacomputing, UC- Santa Barbara (MAYHEM in case you weren’t seeing the silly nomenclature trend) has jumped the public lagoon for the open waters of commerce:

Eucalyptus Systems, formed out of the team that developed EUCALYPTUS has gone commercial to sell help with their open-source software to cloud-minded types.

EUCALYPTUS (fingers…getting…so… tired) is a set of open-source software tools that allow users to interact with and deploy AWS-type clouds. You can use the software to administer your EC2 images or create your own private data cloud along the same model. Pretty neat, and free, but what happens when AWS decides to re-tool their APIs? Questions soon to be answered.

read the press release here.

watch this page for updates.

Amazon claims 400,000 web services users

An industry insider close to Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) business unit told us the company claims to have 400,000 customers using its web services offering.

AWS includes EC2, the compute-on-demand offering, S3, the hosted storage service, SimpleDB for hosted databases, Simple Queue Service (SQS) a communication channel for developers to store messages and CloudFront, which is a content delivery network.

Amazon has not publicly discussed much detail about its customers and how they are using AWS. For instance, of these 400,000 users, how many are using EC2 and S3, just S3 or just EC2? Is anyone using SimpleDB or CloudFront yet? How many of these users were one-time customers? My hunch is that 400,000 number includes any customer that has touched AWS regardless of whether they are still using it.

In conversations with IT users, it’s clear they are interested in these services, but need more reference cases on how to use it. A great success story goes a long way.

During a webinar on cloud computing today, James Staten, principal analyst at Forrester Research said enterprises need more transparency from EC2 to show that it can meet SLAs. “The predictability [of the service] is not good enough for business,” he said, noting that EC2 had two lengthy outages in 2008.  Small businesses and gaming and entertainment companies are the biggest adopters of EC2, he said. The former can’t afford to build their own datacenters, while gaming and movie companies require extra infrastructure around the release of new games and movies, which can be setup and torn down as needed.

Staten said enterprises are using cloud services like EC2 for R&D projects, quick promotions, partner integration and colloboration and new ventures.  He called for more companies to share how they are using these services and recommended that IT shops begin to experiment with it.  Staten suggested endorsing one to two clouds as “IT approved” and establishing an internal policy for using these services. He urged IT organizations to let cloud providers know what you want and what’s more important to you? Secure enterprise links, standards, SLA expectations, levels of support (24/7 phone support, for example)? My guess would be all of the above. If you’d rather, I can hammer on the vendors, so let me know.