Introducing Deltacloud

The initiation of a new open source project within Red Hat is certainly not news. It’s an established expectation within our engineering ranks. It’s how we advance and develop software.

Every once in a while, though, a new project breaks through the norm of business as usual. Something special. Creating a buzz.

Today that project is http://deltacloud.org.

The goal is simple. To enable an ecosystem of developers, tools, scripts, and applications which can interoperate across the public and private clouds.

Today each infrastructure-as-a-service cloud presents a unique API that developers and ISVs need to write to in order to consume the cloud service. The deltacloud effort is creating a common, REST-based API, such that developers can write once and manage anywhere.

A cloud broker if you will, with drivers that map the API to both public clouds like EC2, and private virtualized clouds based on VMWare and Red Hat Enterprise Linux with integrated KVM.

The API can be test driven with the self-service web console, which is also a part of the deltacloud effort.

While it is a young project, the potential impact on users, developers, and IT to consume cloud services via a common set of tools is epic.