Are Amazon's Web Services Going Open Source? 42
ruphus13 writes "Amazon has been one of the early movers in the cloud computing space, with its AWS offerings, including S3 and EC2. Now, there is a lot of chatter around the imminent open sourcing of all its APIs and services and the impact that will have on the other 'clouds' out there — public or private. From the article, 'Amazon faces significant threats from open source cloud computing efforts if it pursues a purely proprietary path [...] Amazon can't ignore the cost advantages and diversity of product offerings that open source players are already offering in the cloud computing space. The company's best move is to open source its tools, which will end up diversifying them, play on a level field in terms of cost with the open source alternatives, and charge for services. Absent these moves, the company will lose potential customers to free, open source alternatives [...] Word is Amazon's legal team is currently 'investigating' open sourcing their various web services API's including EC2, S3, etc.', although these have not been confirmed by Amazon."
Eucalyptus and EC2 (Score:3, Interesting)
Folks may be familiar with the open source EC2 "clone" (or whatever) Eucalyptus [eucalyptus.com]. The latest version even has Elastic Block Storage support [eucalyptus.com]. Is anyone using it in anger?
Most of what I've been waiting for. (Score:4, Interesting)
Up to now, every "cloud" solution has been completely different, meaning that once you invest in getting one to work, you lose much of that investment if try moving to another. There are *lots* of important dimensions to compete on -- bandwidth cost, CPU cost, RAM cost, OS selection, security, privacy, reliability, reliability, and did I mention reliability? -- but until there is a common platform among vendors, it's all apples and oranges comparison.
Open source would change all that.
Suddenly, I can compare the cost of building it myself to the cost of having Amanzon do it. Due to scale, Amazon should win, but maybe I want to pay for less reliability for my development environment, or I want to pay for more reliability by duplicating that environment among several vendors, or I want to keep the super-sensitive data on my own data haven. Win, win, win.