IAAS players: open-source vs. commercial

While spending time in traffic jams on the E19 on my way to customers in Brussels, listened to an interesting episode of the CloudComputingPodcast by David Linthicum: James Staten of Forrested gave his view on the different IAAS cloud offerings. This interview was trigger by an article written by James Staten. Interesting to hear James evaluate and categorized all the major players.  Below some notes I made while listening to the podcast.

• Open source
• Eucalyptis
• Clean room implementation of EC2
• Was very popular
• Eucalyptis moved focus from community to building up company and lost focus
• http://www.openstack.org/

• Joint project of Nasa & Rackspace, compatible with the Amazon API's
• Just arrived in time to take over the momentum of Eucalyptis
• Maturing technology, still important code chunks of code required to be added by vendors
• Expected to become very solid
• Not generating a lot of revenue but generating a lot of attention
• Vendors need to wait for Openstack to become more mature; how long will vendors have patience for Openstack to generate revenue and profit?
• Many commercial vendors contributing code to it: Rackspace, IBM, VMWare, Redhat, Cisco, Dell, HP, ... (10 million dollar)
• Adoption of Openstack is still low, Rightscale just recently move to OpenStack for its own cloud offering
• The "Linux of the cloud world": kernel will become strong with all contributions coming back
• Participants want to make large revenues with it or at least weaken their competitors; in particular HP and IBM have long standing reputations to contribute back to the communitry
• Smaller participants will position themselves in specific niche markets
• Openstack is an open source project, not an open source standard
• Cloudstack

• Cloudstack is more mature
• Cloudstack was acquired by Citrix
• Only one big distributor: Citrix
• Citrix donated Cloudstack to the Apache community
• Ready to generate revenue now
• Lacks the "momentum" of Openstack
• Commercial leaders
• Amazon AWS 
• Supported by large like Accenture & Deloitte
• Also still maturing,but further down the road
• VMWare vCloud Director
• 
  
• Managed services provided by Deloitte, Accenture and other

What to bet on for now? Amazon on the public side and VMWare on the private side. Openstack may mature - similar to Linux - in 2 or 3 years. Amazon is a strong player but not yet a dominator of the public cloud market.  But in the private cloud world, most customers are still doing static virtualizaton, "still a lot of ground to be taken".

This podcast was really good, recommended!