A standard cloud computing API
Crowded Cloud
Despite plenty of discussion to the contrary, cloud computing still has very few standards. Instead, the emphasis has been on development. Many different public clouds have been created in the past few years, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and JiffyBox. In the US, these vendors are joined by providers such as GoGrid, Rackspace, and Terremark (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Apache Deltacloud supports private clouds and a range of public clouds, including Amazon EC2 (Eucalyptus is an open source solution compatible with the Amazon cloud), Microsoft Windows Azure, and VMware vCloud. (Source: Red Hat)
Providers, as well as suppliers of proprietary technologies, often prefer to follow their own ideas of how a cloud and the applications within it should be accessed, operated, and managed. Business customers, on the other hand, are often reluctant to be tied to a single cloud provider. Interoperability, or the ability to migrate smoothly from one provider to another, is therefore becoming more and more important.
Although an impressive number of public clouds are on offer, many businesses choose to provide applications and
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