The furor at Sun's CommunityOne East Developer Conference was all centered around the company's unveiling of its Open Cloud Platform - a set of core technologies, APIs and protocols. During the two day event held in New York City, Sun previewed plans to launch the Sun Cloud, its first public cloud service targeted at developers, students, and startups. Sun's strategy is to bring openness and interoperability to the cloud computing market, the company said.

The core of the Sun Cloud will be the first two services expected this summer:

• Sun Cloud Storage Service: Supports WebDAV protocols for easy file access and object store APIs that are compatible with Amazon's S3 APIs.

• The Sun Cloud Compute Service: Centers around the Virtual Data Center (VDC) capabilities acquired in Sun's purchase of Q-layer in January 2009, which provides everything developers need to build and operate a data center in the cloud. The VDC provides a unified, integrated interface to stage an application running on any operating system within a cloud, including OpenSolaris, Linux or Windows. It features a drag-and-drop method, in addition to APIs and a command line interface for provisioning compute, storage and networking resources via any Web browser.

Other related announcements made during the CommunityOne event held March 18-19th included:

• Release of a core set of Open APIs: Sun cloud APIs are being released for public review and comment, so that others building public and private clouds can easily design them for compatibility with the Sun Cloud. Sun's Cloud API specifications are published under the Creative Commons license, which essentially allows anyone to use them in any way. Developers will be able to deploy applications to the Sun Cloud immediately, by leveraging pre-packaged VMIs (virtual machine images) of Sun's open source software, eliminating the need to download, install and configure infrastructure software.

• Broad partner support for its cloud platform: Cloud Foundry, RightScale and Zmanda are three of the many cloud application providers, cloud management solution providers, Service Providers, and cloud consulting companies partnering with Sun. Eucalyptus, an open source infrastructure for implementing cloud computing, is also supporting Sun's approach to drive standards-based, open source cloud platforms and applications, enabling users to integrate with other platforms and services.

"Sun's approach to cloud computing blends our expertise in developing open source software and communities with unique design innovation. Sun's Open Cloud platform is the first step in delivering on our vision of a world that has many clouds that are both open and interoperable," said Dave Douglas, senior vice president, Cloud Computing, Sun. "Our cloud architecture empowers developers with the expanded interoperability and freedom of choice they need to easily take advantage of the agility, efficiency and cost benefits of cloud computing."

More Information

CommunityOne East on-demand Webcasts

More on CommunityOne East

Sun Cloud Computing

APIs for the Sun Cloud service

More details on the Cloud APIs from Craig McClanahan

A walk-through of the APIs

Sun Cloud Partner Initiative

Sun Microsystems Unveils Open Cloud Platform

Sun Microsystems Hosts CommunityOne Open Source Developer Conference for World\'s Technology Communities [...read more...]

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