Cloud Vendor Taxonomy

The Cloud is here to stay. Already we are seeing stabilisation in the marketplace with some clear leaders emerging. Our Cloud Vendor Taxonomy chart is an attempt to delineate some of the relationships amongst the key players and also allow us to define new entrants. It’s not a hard and fast mapping (for instance OCCI is both a standard and a reference implementation) so expect the borders to be a little blurry.

At the bottom we have the virtualization vendors who provide the core substrate on which all “for sale or rent” clouds get built.  One could argue that one of the key enablers of cloud computing is the advent of cheap ubiquitous virtualisation technology. Intel hegemony certainly helped. The gorilla in the marketplace here is VMware, with a huge footprint gained by promoting server virtualisation in enterprises. However the product has been historically expensive (though this is changing in response to significant competition) which opened the door to VMware’s major competitor Xen, an open source alternative which is now part of the Citrix stable.

Its no accident that the most successful public cloud vendor,  Amazon chose Xen as its hypervisor.  With cost reduction being front and centre of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) business model, a low or no cost Hypervisor was a key component in their strategy.  In the public cloud field only Amazon is continuing to innovate with offerings like SimpleDB, Virtual Private Cloud, MapReduce and auto-scaling.  Even Microsoft has struggled to keep up with their Azure offering. The rest have so far limited themselves to storage and compute offerings.

Amazon and Microsoft have turned the public cloud business into a billion dollar game with table stakes set at millions of dollars. Only those with the deepest pockets can now compete with them on a  global scale in multiple legal jurisdictions.

But there is more than the public cloud at stake. Private clouds and their near cousins, hybrid clouds which combine the flexibility of the public cloud with the control and additional (potential) security of a private cloud. With hybrid clouds come hybrid cloud stacks. OpenNebula, OpenStack and Eucalyptus all offer cloud building capabilities that combine the capabilities of private clouds with the option to integrate public clouds (primarily AWS).  These companies are all about building clouds with public private components. The next level in the stack is cloud abstraction.

If the hybrid vendors are about building clouds, the cloud abstraction vendors are about using clouds. For organisations that are offering multiple cloud offerings or for vendors that must support both on-premise and in-cloud deployments the cloud abstraction vendors offer freedom from lockin to a particular public cloud vendor. Choose your compute instances and storage based on a per-application policy criteria rather than an organisation wide selection policy.

• LibCloud: An Apache incubator project started by CloudKick (now part of RackSpace) . This is a Python library primarily concerned with starting compute instances. It supports an impressive list of providers.
• DeltaCloud: DeltaCloud was initiated as an Open Source project at RedHat and has since moved the DeltaCloud Core  to Apache incubator status as well.  Think of DeltaCloud as LibCloud with a REST API. Current installations only work on RedHat. What the differences are between DeltaCloud as offered by RedHat and DeltaCloud Core on Apache remains to be seen.
• CloudLoop: A Java implementation of  a standard API to storage.  Currently only supports Amazon S3, RackSpace CloudFiles and Nirvanix.
• SimpleCloud: A PHP cut at the problem.  Has some heavy weight supporters including IBM, RackSpace and Microsoft.  They offer File, Document and queuing storage APIs. SimpleCloud uses the term Document storage for what the rest of the world calls Table Storage or NoSQL storage.