An Open-Source Food Fight in the Cloud

To date, the four horsemen of the cloud appear to be Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google, and VMware. The first three companies have built their own cloud computing services that consumers and businesses can tap into. Instead of doing its own service, VMware, the maker of virtualization software, is selling a new suite of cloud software so that service providers and businesses can build their own new-age, cloud computing systems.

The collective muscle

The collective muscle and proprietary leanings of those four companies has triggered something of a cloud panic. At its core, cloud computing promises lower costs and greater flexibility than traditional data centers. It's a way to avoid lock-in, that mainframe-era problem where a company buys its own big, expensive systems-and is stuck with them. However those advantages could be undermined if, say, Amazon decides to play the heavy and makes it difficult for companies to move their software and data onto a competing cloud service. That would be lock-in, cloud edition.

With CloudStack, any service provider or business can create their own cloud computing system and have it interact with Amazon's cloud service as then. Zynga, for instance, started out using Amazon to keep up with the demand for its online games. At that time, Zynga got so big that it made more sense for the game maker to build its own data centers and manage them nearly as a single computer that can free up extra computing and storage power for certain games as needed. To do so, Zynga used Cloud.com research, and it can after all farm out extra work to Amazon if needed.

Peder Ulander, the vice president of cloud platforms at Citrix, contends that OpenStack lacked the requisite oversight to advance the software at a quick clip. Citrix offered to contribute its own innovation to OpenStack to speed it along, nevertheless those offers were rebuffed, Ulander says. "There are a lot of rumblings that OpenStack is not maturing fast enough," he says.

For Citrix, this gamble is huge. It paid $500 million for XenSource in 2007, hoping to undercut VMware's rise. Though plenty of companies use the open-source Xen software, Citrix has never come close to seeing VMware-style earnings or profits. It's rumored that Citrix paid about $250 million for Cloud.com. Once again it's going up against VMware and other open-source players in a nasty battle for the future of computing.