Cloud.com is working with Microsoft to integrated Hyper-V into their OpenStack project.
“OpenStack is a collection of open source technology products delivering a scalable, secure, standards-based cloud computing software solution. OpenStack is currently developing two interrelated technologies: OpenStack Compute and OpenStack Object Storage. OpenStack Compute is the internal fabric of the cloud creating and managing large groups of virtual private servers and OpenStack Object Storage is software for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of commodity servers to store terabytes or even petabytes of data”.
My guess is that we’re seeing an implementation of OVF, the Open Virtualization Format. This provides for a portable package containing a virtual machine and its metadata. This means we move one step closer to interoperable clouds – the subject of a presentation I did 2 days ago at Eurocloud Ireland.
Microsoft calls this sort of this a cross-premises cloud. That means your private cloud (Hyper-V with SCVMM and SCVMM SSP 2.0) can integrate with Azure “virtual machine hosting” (Bob Muglia @PDC09) and other public clouds.
Think about it … an app developer likes “the cloud” because they don’t want to care about the infrastructure. They just consume as required. But they still need to care about which cloud they use. In the near future, they’ll just work in “the clouds”, just using whatever cloud is cheapest and, hopefully (pending licensing and hosting company cooperating) be able to move VMs or application components between clouds as they see fit. We may even see the emergence of cloud computing brokers just like we have insurance brokers now. You just pay them to find you the cheapest and most suitable service and they do the moving on a day-by-day or month-by-month basis. That’ll probably need some sort of white/black list for service providers that you set up.
BTW, this is my first post with Windows Live Writer 2011. It’s got the ribbon interface and is very like Office/Windows 7.