A big week for Cloud Operating Systems
This week has been a big week for the world of Cloud Computing, with 2 leading software companies announcing the release of their ‘Cloud Computing’ focused products.
First was the announcement of the much anticipated VMware ESX4.0, which has now been redubbed ‘vSphere‘ or as VMware like to call it the first ‘Cloud Operating System‘. vSphere brings some significant enhancements to the VMware hypervisor, including support for up to 8 virtual processors and up to 255GB RAM per virtual machine. But perhaps more importantly, vSphere is paving the way for public/private cloud interaction. VMware has been working closely with major cloud service providers in the US including T-Mobile and Terremark to build a product which will eventually facilitate the easy migration of virtual machines from private to public clouds.
What does this mean? Quite simply, if you are investing in VMware infrastructure internally today, it will be easy for you to tap into external cloud resource in future to cope with scaling or elasticity of computing resource demands.
The second announcement was the release yesterday of Ubuntu Server 9.04, codenamed ‘Jaunty Jackalope’. Sponsored by Canonical, Ubuntu is rapidly becoming one of the most widely deployed and widely respected Linux distributions both for the server and the desktop.
Jaunty Jackalope has also been developed with private/public cloud integration in mind. Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud will enable Ubuntu Server users to create Cloud Computing style environments behind their own firewalls. Virtual machines created in the ‘Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud’ will run on Amazon’s EC2 cloud without any modification.
Amazon has also certified Ubuntu 9.04 for deployment on their EC2 cloud, so Amazon customers can now buy prepackaged Ubuntu machines. Ubuntu Server edition is available to Cloud Data customers on our Cloud Server offering.
This is important news for the development of ’standards’ the world of Cloud Computing - ultimately cloud compute and storage resource will become as standardised as the ‘Internet’ itself, and these announcements are a big step in that direction.
