From the ‘Linux Vendors Choose Cloud Victor’ files:
Over the last two weeks there has been a whole lot of news about ‘open’ clouds. From my perspective though there is now one clear winner – OpenStack.
As opposed to say Eucalyptus or CloudStack, OpenStack has one key item that those other two ‘open’ cloud efforts do not – THE SUPPORT OF EVERY MAJOR LINUX DISTRIBUTION.
With OpenStack’s big announcement this week, Canonical, SUSE and Red Hat are all now aligned on the same open source cloud effort. That doesn’t mean that Eucalyptus is dead or that CloudStack won’t have users. It means strategically the enterprise Linux community is saying that OpenStack is the platform they are investing in and will be offering to their commercial customers.
It didn’t start out this way of course.
Red Hat wasn’t aligned with OpenStack in 2010 and Canonical still supported only Eucalyptus then too. What has happened is the open source model has spoken. Developers have come to the Bazaar to build OpenStack and the Linux vendors aren’t about to be stuck in cathedrals when it comes to the cloud.
OpenStack has done something very unique in that regard. The community around it (thanks in part to the helping hand of Rackspace) has built a platform that isn’t specific to any one vendor’s interest or product roadmap. It’s a platform that much like Linux itself, is a collection of the wants and needs of all of its respective contributors.
It’s somewhat ironic that this same week that OpenStack hit this massive milestone, that VMware’s CTO, Steve Herrod declared that he wants’ VMware’s CloudFoundry to ,’..be the Linux of the cloud.”
Steve – I hate to break it to you, but the Linux vendors have spoken and OpenStack is the Linux of the cloud.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
