Open Source Cloud Projects

Philosophy

Rainer Maria Rilke

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

March 16, 2010

I had the privilege of meeting some of the developers of open source cloud projects today at CloudConnect. Adrian Cole of jClouds, Mitch Garnaat of Boto, and Mike Mayo of CloudTouch were on a panel called "Writing Code for Many Clouds."

We're heading rapidly toward a world where there will be a small number of very big providers of cloud infrastructure - Amazon and Rackspace are currently the top in volume (see Guy Rosen's State of the Cloud for March 2010), with a huge gap to the next providers. Google and Microsoft will surely account for a large number of sites as they get their adoption engines and developer evangelist teams going.

Basic economics and business strategy dictate that these providers will differentiate from each other based on features and APIs, regardless of standards. We need to accept this as fact. We don't have to accept that we have no choice but to pick one or the other, however. We can embrace open source projects which limit the impact of different clouds, making portability easier.

This will only happen if developers get involved. To that end, here's a short (not exhaustive) list of some open source projects that are trying to make a difference. They need your usage and participation. You need them to keep the cloud open.

In no particular order, and including some very early stage projects (like cloudtouch for iPhone and iPad based management of clouds):

(Click to enlarge)

In the slide above (which we presented on the panel) lists the type of abstractions managed by the project. Compute means managing instances (like EC2), storage means managing storage (like S3 or EBS), IAAS means the works - including load balancing, networking, etc.

Here are links to the projects: