You're The Ugly Sisters

Today, Rackspace opened its first cloud built on research its been working on for years, known as OpenStack. This is a cloud operating system built by over 160 would-be competitors to Amazon.

"Last week, during the ugly sisters were squabbling, clients were getting on with business and choosing their Cinderella as VMware," VMware's Mathew Lodge, senior director, Cloud Product Marketing wrote in a blog post today.

Amazon is the gold standard for cloud computing -- it offers more cloud services and has more clients than the others. However it's as well a closed proprietary system. If you want to build a cloud and compete with Amazon, sorry, you can't have any of Amazon's innovation to do it. And if you are a customer using Amazon and you want to move to another cloud provider, it's not so easy to do.

So companies that sell IT to enterprises have been tripping over themselves to come up with clouds let enterprises move between different hosting providers. The biggest such effort is Rackspace's OpenStack, built on research from NASA. Some 160 companies have helped built OpenStack and all of them -- and anyone else -- can take that work and build their own cloud using OpenStack.