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by justinsb 5182 days ago
Or half-hosted on HP, half hosted on Rackspace's OpenStack product (when it is released), so that you don't need to code to two different APIs.

Or half-hosted on IBM, half-hosted on Internap, half-hosted on Dell public cloud, half-hosted in a private cloud... all with the same OpenStack API.

If you decide you want to run your own hardware (as Zynga did & Justin.TV did when EC2 got too expensive), you just install OpenStack on your hardware - it is open source.

This is why Amazon scrambled to partner with Eucalyptus recently, so that they could have something to point to as an alternative that supports the EC2 API.
1 comments
viraptor 5182 days ago
Actually unless you're doing something very tightly connected to one single service, there's a number of libraries you can use which will give you a nice abstraction.

There was also some reverse-proxy which "normalises" your requests for a given provider presented on Fossdem this year, but I can't recall the name.

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justinsb 5182 days ago
Abstraction layers are nice in principle, but the issue isn't really the APIs, it is the different semantics. To give a concrete example, on Rackspace's (current) IaaS offering disks are local to the machine and persistent; on Amazon's offering disks are local and ephemeral, or locked to one AZ and persistent.

The API issue is a triviality compared to hiding those details. I think that's the real power of OpenStack - the shared API is a convenience, but the shared model is priceless.

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