Tyranny of Choice in the Cloud

  

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There are now so many options when deploying to the cloud, enterprises are being faced with a Tyranny of Choice.  

They can get an IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) solution from:

• Amazon
• GoGrid
• Joyent
• Rackspace
• Savvis
• Slicehost
• SoftLayer
• Terremark
• VMware vCloud
• many others

Or they can roll their own IaaS by starting with:

• Cloud.com
• Eucalyptus
• OpenStack
• VMware
• many others

If they require services over and above basic IaaS, they can get a PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) solution from:

• Amazon
• Azure
• EngineYard
• Google App Engine
  
• GridGain
• Heroku
• VMware/SalesForce
• many others 

And now Red Hat with their JBoss-based PaaS solution for cloud computing.  Underlying this solution is an Apache-licensed open source package called Deltacloud, which intends to abstract cloud provider API's to increase solution portability.  (The cloud is built on open source, you know.)

But Deltacloud is not the only cross-cloud enabler out there.  Not by a long shot.  There's also:

• fog
• jclouds
• libcloud
• libvirt
• lots more

That's a lot of options to get the basics up and running.  What if I want monitoring, security, disaster recovering, or other sprinkles on top?  Don't worry, there are lots of choices:

• AppDynamics - cloud monitoring console, performance stats
• BitNami - software packages, multi-cloud deployment
• Cloudkick - tagging, monitoring, multiple clouds, web terminal
• Cloudscaling - services around building private clouds
• CloudStatus - tracks Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine for outages, performance
• CloudSwitch - migrating enterprise apps to the cloud, VMware-based
• enStratus - management, governance
  
• InMage - cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) solutions
  
• New Relic - cloud monitoring console, performance stats 
• RightScale - auto-scale, management, deployment
• rPath - packaging, deployment, updates
  
• Scalr - auto-scale Amazon EC2, database backup & replication, monitoring, stats
• Standing Cloud - software packages, multi-cloud deployment
• Ylastic - Amazon and Eucalyptus monitoring

Wow.  With all those implementations, it would be great if there were industry standards to rely on so interoperability and portability were realistic goals.  Or maybe at least some cross-vendor groups focused on working together, even though some people think it's way too early for cloud standards.  No problem:

• Cloud Commons - Trip Advisor for the cloud
  
• Open Cloud Manifesto - let's all play nice
• Open Cloud Consortium - interoperability, testing
• Open Cloud Initiative - OCP (Open Cloud Principles) - definitions
• Open Cloud Computing Interface Working Group - IaaS interface API's

Ouch.

There are now so many choices in all these areas that paralysis may set in.  Inevitably, consolidation and fall out will take place over the next few years, but anybody who wants to jump in today will need to navigate some fairly murky (cloudy?) waters.