Red Hat wants one API to rule all clouds

Red Hat launched the Deltacloud project late last week, which is aimed at creating an application programming interface (API) to unify the disparate cloud platforms out there. The objective, according to Red hat Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens is to "foster an ecosystem of users, tools and products for the clouds. Developers can write to a common API to blend public and private clouds."

The project certainly looks like it started out on strong footing. Even at its launch, Deltacloud already supports Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and VMware's ESX, while support for Rackspace's cloud infrastructure is expected to be added soon. However, there is no mention of Microsoft's upcoming Azure cloud offering, or Amazon's Elastic Compute 2 (EC2) platform.

It is way too early to tell whether Deltacloud will succeed, or simply fall by the wayside as it gets overwhelmed by the sheer number of new players on the cloudscape. Personally though, I find it hard to imagine any of the vendors would be in any hurry to ensure interpolation at this stage of the game.

Laurent Lachal, an open-source research director at Ovum holds a pragmatic view of the Deltacloud project. Lachal told ZDNet UK. "Red Hat is hoping the (open-source) community will pick this up, but it is just one more effort in a variety of efforts."

For more on this story:
- check out this article at CNET News

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