Pretty bold move by VMops! They evidently bought the cloud.com domain and are rebranding to Cloud.com on the occasion of their new release, now called CloudStack 2.0, which they’re also open-sourcing at open.cloud.com. With this they’re joining the open source private cloud landscape which Eucalyptus pioneered. We’ve been seeing a lot of interest in the private cloud space and have been working with Eucalyptus for a long time and with VMops/Cloud.com more recently. Eucalyptus support has been available in the RightScale dashboard for over a year, but stay tuned for more in-depth support of private clouds by us.

It’s interesting to see that Cloud.com is planning to support the EC2 API as well as the vCloud API, plus their current (native?) API. Eucalyptus is similarly able to support the vCloud API in addition to the EC2 API. This brings home the point that the API itself is more a programming exercise than a fundamental issue, it’s the semantics of the resources behind the API that really matter. Seemingly obscure stuff like: can you reattach a disk volume across datacenters, or can you move an IP address across datacenters, things that deeply affect how one builds redundant services in a particular cloud.

The move to support the EC2 API as well as the vCloud API is a clear indication of the market direction, which is what we call hybrid cloud use-cases where organizations use private/internal clouds for some use-cases and external/public clouds for others. Many of the larger organizations we talk to want to enable these hybrid clouds, and to manage them from one unified platform such as RightScale.