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Amazon Web Services pondering Open Source model?

Tony Chan | June 2, 2009 | 0 Comments

Slashdot has an article that notes that Amazon Web Services might go open source. Based on a OStatic report that cites rumours cited by open cloud evangelist, Reuven Cohen, Amazon, whose APIs for its EC2 and S3 cloud offerings are deemed by Cohen as ‘the defacto standard’ for cloud services, is investigating the possibility of adopting an open source model.

What is worth noting is that the majority of cloud services are built using Open Source Linux anyways. The difference is that each cloud operator, such as Amazon or Rackspace, has spent a lot of time building up their own implementation of an application environment. In fact, Rackspace CTO John Engates told Green Telecom recently that one of the key challenges in the company’s development of its cloud offering is the company had to re-engineer itself into a software development house.

According to Engates, the APIs for clouds are available to developers now, the only catch is that they are not available for others to implement as part of a competing cloud offering. There are exceptions, such as Sun’s cloud platform, which can be used by anybody to build their cloud. Sun however – as far as I can remember – did not specified whether or not those APIs are part of an open source model.

If I understand the industry correctly, all the cloud operators readily make their APIs open to developers. In other words, if you want to develop an application or service for Amazon’s cloud, you can simply ask for the APIs and built them into your application. On the other hand, if you want to build your own cloud service and want to base your infrastructure on Amazon’s implementation, hence use the same APIs, then they will sue you.

When Cohen, one of the principals behind the Open Cloud Manifesto, talks about open source, or the open cloud, he actually means a model that is more like ‘Linux for all clouds.’ What he wants is a common implementation of the cloud infrastructure, meaning a common platform (and the related set of APIs) adopted by everybody, and developed, like Linux, by everybody.

There’s a big difference. For someone like Amazon, adopting the open source model would mean relinquishing the investments they have made on developing their cloud platform, as well as any competitive advantage those investments may, or may not, have given the company. On the other hand, they get a whole lot of developers building applications for their service.

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