Today’s Guest Post is by Sharon Florentine. Sharon is a blogger for Rackspace.  Rackspace Hosting is the service leader in cloud computing, and a founder of OpenStack, an open source cloud operating system. The San Antonio-based company provides Fanatical Support to its customers and partners, across a portfolio of IT services, including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing.

It can be uncomfortable in the cloud. With nebulous definitions and still-emerging best practices, its no wonder many organizations are confused and uncertain about moving their data and applications.

One of the major confusion areas involves the open cloud. It can be difficult to sift through the buzzwords and determine what is and isn’t an open cloud.

Alex Williams, writing at TechCrunch.com, lays out a pretty exhaustive list of the qualifications a cloud solution must have to be considered an open cloud. While Williams’ list is not completely comprehensive, the major points are that an open cloud must have freely accessible, open application programming interfaces (APIs), the freedom to move data between providers at will and the fact that there’s no on-site hardware requirement.

In addition, he adds that an open cloud is federated, meaning your organization can run its apps and move data across multiple cloud environments.

Williams’ full list is here; but the major elements of an open cloud he lists include:

—An open cloud has open APIs.

—An open cloud has a developer community that collaborates on developing the cloud infrastructure or platform environment.

—An open cloud gives users the rights to move data as wished.

—An open cloud is federated — you can run your apps and data across multiple cloud environments.

—An open cloud does not require an IT administrator to provision and manage.

—An open cloud does not require new hardware.

One of the original proponents of the open cloud is OpenStack, produces a ubiquitous cloud computing platform for both private and public clouds, and aims for a simple, scalable and feature-rich solution.

The code for OpenStack is licensed under the Apache 2.0, and is available to any developer who can run it, build upon it and/or submit updates and changes back to the project, ensuring evolution of the platform without the fear of proprietary lock-in.

Whether you’re a corporation, a service provider, a research lab, a university, a major enterprise, a midsized business or an SMB VARS, SMBs, launching a public or private cloud environment and leveraging the support and resulting technology of a global open source community can foster great advances in the cloud.

This post is written by Rackspace blogger Sharon Florentine. Rackspace Hosting is the service leader in cloud computing, and a founder of OpenStack, an open source cloud operating system. The San Antonio-based company provides Fanatical Support to its customers and partners, across a portfolio of IT services, including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing.

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