Page 143 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

O VERCOMING RESISTANCE T O THE CL OUD

The two formats do not build virtual machines in the same
way and are incompatible. The Enterprise Edition software,
however, invokes a converter that changes the VMware’s
VMDK virtual machine into an AMI recognized by EC2. A
workload in the VMware private cloud can now migrate across
the boundary to function in the Amazon cloud. This opens up

a path for coordination between public and private clouds.
At this point, Eucalyptus has stopped short of trying to cre-
ate look-alike APIs for some of Amazon’s more advanced serv-
ices, such as the SimpleDB database service, Amazon Elastic
MapReduce, or Amazon Relational Database Service. Never-
theless, Eucalyptus has broken down several barriers to con-
structing the private cloud. Because Eucalyptus is open source

code, its core APIs are in the public arena.
A related effort is Simple API for Cloud Application Serv-
ices, an open source project led by Zend Technologies. It seeks
to provide an API for types of services that are found in the
public cloud, and then let different clouds support that API, if
they choose to do so. Zend’s aim is to allow an application run-
ning in an enterprise to invoke, say, a Simple API for storage
and receive the storage service that is available from the cloud
it’s dealing with—if that cloud supports Simple API. Simple

API may become a way to level the playing field and give new
cloud service providers a shot at attracting business from
emerging private clouds. Simple API already works across the
Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network, a public cloud storage
provider, and Amazon’s S3. That means an application built
to run in one cloud could be moved to another and make use
of the same services without being changed.

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