libbyclark's blog

This week in the open source cloud headlines, SUSE makes a splash with its pro-open blog post on Forbes and a shout-out from OStatic for its own cloud contribution. Rackspace and HP both debuted OpenStack-based clouds this week. And Netflix released its Chaos Monkey cloud-testing application to the open source community.

Editor’s Note: This profile is part of an ongoing weekly series on Leaders of the Open Cloud in advance of CloudOpen, Aug. 29-31 in San Diego.

This week's top open source cloud news features VMware's acquisition of Nicira; a Q&A with Citrix's Mark Hinkle; the pros and cons of open source cloud platforms for IT managers; and insider news that Nebula has enticed some Rackspace developers away. 

Much debate has occurred recently over whether Amazon’s API should be considered a de facto standard by cloud computing service providers. Those who reject this notion (ahem, Lew Moorman) say you can’t clone Amazon’s cloud by copying its API alone.

As the Senior Director of Cloud Computing Community at Citrix, Mark Hinkle oversees Citrix efforts around the open source Apache CloudStack IaaS platform and Xen hypervisor projects.

Citrix is still very closely involved in CloudStack, which was donated to the Apache Software Foundation in April. Citrix developers are now involved in driving user adoption for CloudStack and helping to shepherd the project through the Apache Foundation’s incubation process.

This week's open source cloud headlines include several OpenStack-related announcements, denials from VMware that it might spin off its own open source Cloud Foundry and a new global-scale CloudStack deployment.

HP Cloud Object Storage and CDN Move to General AvailabilityHP Scaling the Cloud Blog 

Congratulations to Brian Beck and Sabrina Aqil, our two winners in The Linux Foundation's 2012 "Inspired by Linux" T-shirt Design Contest! Their awesome t-shirt designs took first and second place, respectively, in the community vote.

Opscode's open source framework Chef is part of the orchestration layer of platform-agnostic software aimed at allowing developers to create a reproducible blueprint for server configuration and automation. CTO Chris Brown says IaaS and PaaS architects could take a lesson from Chef in finding a common recipe for communicating capabilities between machines in a cloud or between clouds.

This week the open cloud news headlines feature a new OpenNebula release, a new cloud controller plug-in for OpenStack and an interview with Rackspace's Lew Moorman on APIs and the open cloud.

This week the open cloud news headlines feature the OpenNebula 3.6 release, a new cloud controller plug-in for OpenStack and an interview with Rackspace's Lew Moorman on APIs and the open cloud, among other things.

OpenNebula quietly keeps building its open-source cloud

GigaOM 

Rackspace President Lew Moorman made a splash late last month with his talk at GigaOM’s Structure conference on vendor lock-in and the cloud. He argued that simply cloning proprietary APIs doesn’t solve the compatibility problem for developers that want to maintain ownership of their cloud applications. Here, he explains and expands on that discussion. In order for true innovation to happen in the cloud, he says, we need to develop open standards as a community.