The vendor-neutral cloud: How Red Hat could make it happen

Contrary to popular rumors, Red Hat’s recent Webcast was not to announce an imminent acquisition. Red Hat instead laid out an ambitious cloud strategy, going as far as claiming that only two companies — Microsoft and Red Hat itself — are positioned to deliver an end-to-end cloud stack. However, the most important announcement from Red Hat may well be overshadowed by its comparison versus Microsoft Azure or its platform service plans.

Here’s why IT decision makers shouldn’t ignore Red Hat’s submission of the cloud-neutral Deltacloud cloud API to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and Apache Software Foundation.

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Deltacloud sputtered under a single vendor’s control

Deltacloud was announced nearly a year ago at the 2009 Red Hat summit. At the time, Brian Stevens, CTO and VP of engineering, at Red Hat described Deltacloud’s purpose:

The goal is simple. To enable an ecosystem of developers, tools, scripts, and applications that can interoperate across the public and private clouds.

Today each infrastructure-as-a-service cloud presents a unique API that developers and [software vendors] need to write to in order to consume the cloud service. The Deltacloud effort is creating a common, REST-based API, such that developers can write once and manage anywhere.

A cloud broker if you will, with drivers that map the API to both public clouds like EC2, and private virtualized clouds based on VMware and Red Hat Enterprise Linux with integrated KVM.

Red Hat’s approach was simple and seemingly appealing enough: Write to the Deltacloud APIs and your workloads can be ported across any cloud provider’s infrastructure that Deltacloud ican interoperate with. However, the prospects of trading cloud provider API lock-in for Red Hat API lock-in wasn’t an appealing prospect for potential Deltacloud adopters. Whether Red Hat’s claim to be “the world’s open source leader” is accurate, lock-in is lock-in.

Choosing open standards and open source for Deltacloud

So Red Hat wisely decided to contribute its Deltacloud API implementation to an independent third party, the Apache Software Foundation. By moving the implementation to an Apache Incubator project earlier this summer, the Deltacloud project is no longer saddled with the chains of a single-vendor-controlled open source project. This in turn has made it easier for multiple vendors to consider adopting and contributing to the Deltacloud project.

Red Hat appears to be following the standardization-through-implementation approach and has submitted the Deltacloud API specifications to DMTF cloud standards body.

Regardless of Red Hat’s cloud and platform-service business results, they’ll likely pale in comparison to the customer value enabled should Deltacloud become a widely adopted industry standard. By leveling the cloud workload portability playing field, Red Hat is enabling other vendors to compete based on the quality and completeness of their platform offering rather than portability itself.

It’s encouraging to see that Deltacloud already allows a high level of portability across six cloud providers, with support for two more providers on the way.

Bryan Che, Red Hat’s cloud product manager, explains the Deltacloud announcement: “We do not want Deltacloud to be under the control of any one particular vendor, including Red Hat. If you want true interoperability and true portability, you need a third-party governance structure.”

On the other end of the spectrum are vendors such as Eucalyptus that have decided to adopt Amazon EC2’s APIs. Marten Mickos, Eucalyptus’s CEO, explains: “We believe the Amazon API is becoming the industry standard, and that many companies will follow it.”

Choosing de facto standards vs. open standards

Deltacloud’s success as the standard for controlling cloud operations is far from guaranteed. By the same token, Amazon’s EC2 API remaining the de facto standard is also not guaranteed as cloud usage shifts from early adopters to the mainstream enterprise market. Enterprises have been increasingly educated to demand open standards for which multiple implementations exist.

IT decision-makers must weigh the short-term benefit of adopting a cloud-specific API, such as Amazon’s EC2 API, versus the long-term benefit of a cloud agnostic API such as Deltacloud.

Follow me on Twitter at SavioRodrigues. I should state: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.”

This article, “The vendor-neutral cloud: How Red Hat could make it happen,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Rodrigues et al.’s Open Sources blog and follow the latest developments in open source at InfoWorld.com.