Choosing the right cloud platform
Reference | from zdnet.com | in
The emergence of a number of self-proclaimed ‘open’ cloud platforms presents any would-be cloud adopter with a confusing plethora of choice. Rackspace’s OpenStack initiative, unveiled last week, is the latest, but it’s by no means the only one [disclosure: Rackspace hosts my business and personal websites free of charge]. There are also portability initiatives like VMware’s ‘open PaaS‘ which, except in its use of the Spring stack, seems to be open in much the same way that Windows Azure is open (it’s a published standard and you have a choice of hosting partners).
For cloud adopters all these offerings, in their various ways, hold out the promise of pursuing a hybrid strategy. They’re attractive because they provide the option of putting some assets in the cloud while keeping others on trusted terra firma — or at the very least, a user can reserve the option of pulling their IT back off the provider’s cloud if they ever need to, avoiding lock-in to a single provider.