Citrix stunned its OpenStack partners with news on Tuesday that it is setting up CloudStack as an Apache-based rival to the OpenStack cloud platform.
There’s been a lot of jawing and some bad feelings on both sides: OpenStack wasn’t ready for primetime; Citrix was disloyal, yada yada yada. But now as the smoke starts to clear, here are some key takeaways from the latest cloud spat.
1: The API debate is (still) over
Amazon won. CloudStack’s support of the Amazon API confirms this, much as the Amazon-Eucalyptus deal did a few weeks ago. (Eucalyptus — another OpenStack rival — claims compatibility with the Amazon APIs in a move that should make it easier for private clouds running Eucalyptus to interoperate with workloads in the Amazon public cloud.) As Forrester Research analyst James Staten blogged:“Like Eucalyptus, Citrix CloudStack provides API compatibility with Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The OpenStack community is debating the degree of compatibility its software should have with this de facto and clearly proprietary API set. Citrix no longer has to debate this issue or be beholden to the OpenStack group decision here which looks to be leaning away from EC2 compatibility.”Still, there’s support and then there’s support — and there is real confusion about which clouds support which Amazon APIs. As Adrian Cockroft, Netflix’ director of architecture of cloud systems, tweeted Tuesday:
