vCloud – EC2 killer?
Posted by: Dmitry Sotnikov on: October 1, 2008
Is VMware’s vCloud – a killer for Amazon’s EC2 services? It definitely sounds like they are shooting to get into the same market.
In a nutshell, Amazon allows you to have your (XEN-based) virtual machines run in Amazon’s data center and execute your application. This is great and makes Amazon a leader in that space today but there is a lock-in (as Richard Stallman was saying the other day) – all the APIs are proprietary and your application needs to be designed for EC2 and will only work there.
There is of course the Eucalyptus project seeking to create an on-premise open source version of EC2 but at the moment it is more of an experiment rather than something commercially available for enterprise use.
However, the point is that people do want that kind of portability, and that is what VMware’s vCloud is designed to provide. The vision is that if you have both on-premise virtual infrastructure and external in-the-cloud datacenter infrastructure both built on VMware technology, than you can run the same virtual machines/appliances anywhere you want:
So you are kind of locked to the technology (VMware) but not to a datacenter provider.
At VMworld, the scenario which was demoed had a company start a VM in external datacenter in addition to the ones they had on-premise to offload a part of the peak load. See Michael’s video here.
This is obviously just one of the scenarios. The value of common infrastructure spanning across on-premise and cloud environments goes beyond that and provides the flexibility of using the best resource available at particular time for particular task, and be able to quickly get new resources when needed or reconfigure your virtual datacenter on the fly.
The biggest problem with that, is that for VMware, this is more of a vision thing (despite a line-up of service partners promising to support the platform). It will obviously take time and execution to make it a reality.
Tags: Amazon, Cloud Computing, EC2, Eucalyptus, vCloud, VMware
1 Response to "vCloud – EC2 killer?"
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October 9, 2008 at 1:36 pm
VMWARE vision is very compelling as it allows one to reuse years of investment in current computing environments.
In theory building your application for a virtual platform like Amazon or Google is more efficient from the algorithmic perspective.
However, as VMWARE has proven, a solution that supports current enterprise applications without change was much more successful than revolutionary approaches.
While vCloud is just a set of standards now, It is possible to implement a cloud based solution to run complex, real life enterprise apps and enjoy the benefits of all worlds.
At my company ( http://www.itstructure.com ) we are doing just that.After solving Security,Networking,Storage and multiple machines setup problems, one gets a pretty cool cloud based enterprise environments.
The core of virtualization is in the abstraction if provides between hardware and software. Taking it to the cloud is the next logical step.