Amazon, Eucalyptus team on cloud compatibility

But it could turn out that with IT suppliers and their end-user companies getting increasingly behind the open source OpenStack cloud fabric that was started by NASA and Rackspace Hosting in July 2010, Amazon needs allies cloning its services on private clouds if it hopes to continue to grow its public cloud business as more and more OpenStack public clouds come to market. Seeing as even though AWS and Eucalyptus need each other, it would as well be reasonable to guess that no money changed hands at all.

What Amazon could do

What Amazon could do, clearly, is simply sell chunks of its EC2 and S3 clouds as turnkey systems that drop into corporate data centers, nevertheless which are managed by Amazon just like the "real" EC2 and S3 services are. Yet Amazon's CTO, Werner Vogels, has been adamant that the company doesn't want to do this because it defeats the whole premise of utility-style cloud computing - and trying to sell every bloody clock cycle in the data center.

In principle, the interoperability agreement between Amazon and Eucalyptus resembles the ones that Microsoft inked many years ago with SUSE Linux and Red Hat to ensure interoperability between Windows and Linux.

The performance

Report summarising Microsoft-commissioned testing of the performance and scalability of Hyper-V R2 SP1 server virtualization research.