Open source cloud menacing VMware begins to retaliate

In the VMware website blog, VMware reminds customers of their market leadership in private cloud deployments and has responded to open source cloud platforms such as OpenStack, Cloudstack and eucalyptus. This seems to mark a heated debate between open source and proprietary cloud. Today, open source cloud providers have begun to "scramble for the cloud market", while VMware announces that VMware's Vendor network (which provides public cloud compatibility with the VMware infrastructure within the enterprise) has surpassed more than 100 vendors.

"While these open-source cloud providers are causing some confusion, we believe customers will still choose VMware," Mathew Lodge, head of VMware Cloud Platform, wrote in a blog, adding that there are currently 100 partners and 350,000 users using VMware products, This is more than the sum of the three suppliers.

Over the past few weeks, the three Open-source cloud providers have released a lot of information about open source cloud development platforms. Citrix announced that it would plan to obtain a license from the Apache Software Foundation for Cloudstack to create a competitive open source platform that competes with the OpenStack (already released version fifth software, code-named Essex). Subsequently, Citrix officials played down the rivalry between Cloudstack and OpenStack and tried to focus the debate between VMware and other proprietary products. "It's about the competition between proprietary cloud and open source cloud, and open source cloud will definitely win," said Peder Ulander, vice president of product marketing at Citrix's Cloud platform group.

Now VMware is starting to retaliate. VMware wrote in its blog that its public cloud partner series, which includes 24 countries ' public cloud offerings, is "effectively shaping the world's largest and most compatible public cloud community". Vcloud had only 5 suppliers 18 months ago, and over a year the number of suppliers doubled, to now exceed 100 suppliers.

Nonetheless, competitors have criticized VMware for locking customers into its ecosystem practices. Lodge responded, "For us, openness means that customers can choose where to run their cloud," he said in an interview yesterday, "with 100 of suppliers in our vcloud ecosystem, more choices than any other supplier offers to customers, And we're trying to help move their workloads and data as easily as possible. ”

Common APIs, combined with Vcloud connectors, make it easier to migrate data between the private cloud provided by VMware and the public cloud provided by VMware Partners. Suppliers must demonstrate that they can use Vcloud connectors to upload and download data to the cloud to become partners in the ecosystem, Lodge says: "Openness is not about how you write software, it's about how you get your customers to do that." ”

But Open-source advocates say VMware's products do not provide real freedom for customers to choose. "They offer options, but the choice is controlled by Vcloud," said Sameer Dholakia, vice president and general manager of Citrix's cloud platform group. "In our world, we believe openness means open source." He also said it was one of the reasons for Citrix to obtain Apache licenses for its Cloudstack platform. Dholakia said the 350,000 customers were asked to use the VMware Server virtualization Technology Private cloud, completely "seriously violated" the word open.

Other comments from these open-source suppliers, especially those coming to the cloudstack and eucalyptus, are mainly focused on their compatibility with Amazon. In addition to Amazon's recent announcement of a partnership with Eucalyptus to promote API compatibility, Lodge says, it is hard to move workloads out of the Amazon like the VMware Ecosystem network. "Deploying a hybrid cloud strategy is very challenging, especially when there is no easy way to move from a public cloud to a private cloud," Lodge said in response to Amazon-related issues.

At the same time, VMware appears to be targeting open-source infrastructure, the service provider, which is taking a different approach to its platform as a service, Cloudfoundry, which celebrated its first anniversary this week. The open source platform, the service product, accepts external code from the developer community, and proponents say one of its main strengths is its ability to run on different infrastructure platforms. (邹铮 Compilation)

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)