Open source cloud vendors butt heads at industry event

The elephant in the room was undoubtedly a company not officially represented in the conversation: Amazon Web Services. Much of the conversation, and criticism seemed to be over the strategy each takes in terms of dealing with AWS. Eucalyptus and CloudStack have embraced AWS by working to have fidelity with AWS’s application programming interfaces. OpenStack, while supporting AWS in its open source code, has taken a much different approach and is attempting to position itself as an open-source alternative to AWS, which Rackspace President Lew Moorman outlined earlier this week.

Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos said during the Structure conference in San Francisco this week that Eucalyptus has such strong support for AWS because it is the market leader. Asked if Eucalyptus would support OpenStack APIs, Mickos said: “When we see it actually being adopted broadly in a commercial fashion, we’re happy to look at that.”

Chris Kemp, a co-founder of OpenStack and current president of Nebula, an OpenStack-powered cloud provider, responded by questioning Eucalyptus’s long-term strategy of aligning the company so closely with AWS if the project is open source.

“You don’t have control over the Amazon APIs, that’s why they’re closed,” he said. “There’s only one company on earth that gets to define those APIs.” He added that Eucalyptus has diverged from its open source standard by being so aligned with AWS. Eucalyptus and AWS announced an agreement earlier this year that would allow for joint collaboration of integration between the two systems.

Meanwhile, Sameer Dholakia, group vice president and general manager of the Cloud Platforms group at Citrix added said its “odd” that OpenStack is not doing more to support AWS integration with the project. Citrix made that abundantly clear a couple of months ago when it migrated away from the OpenStack project and released its CloudStack platform to the Apache Software Foundation, which now governs the project. The three representatives did agree that while Eucalyptus and CloudStack are product offerings from a company, OpenStack is an open source code that vendors or end users can adopt themselves to manage a cloud. Dholakia said that approach of offering a specific product drives a different viewpoint.