CloudOpen Preview: Defining the Open Cloud Stack

Greg DeKoenigsberg is the Vice President of Community at Eucalyptus Systems and is on the opening morning keynote panel this Wednesday, August 29 at CloudOpen. He and his fellow panelists, Mark Hinkle from Citrix and Stefano Maffulli from OpenStack will be helping to define the open cloud stack as the conference gets underway. Greg was able to connect with us briefly this week as he prepares for the trip to San Diego. Here’s what he was able to tell us about the panel and his other thoughts on open cloud.

You’re on a keynote panel that will explore what is the open cloud. Can you give us a teaser of the position you will take on this definition?

DeKoenigsberg: Sure. The open cloud builds not only on source code, but on the standards and practices of cloud users. And having a cloud is only a small part of the battle; what ultimately matters is the set of applications that run on that cloud. Right now, the majority of people who are building complex cloud applications are using Amazon Web Services to do it. There’s a tremendous amount of expertise in that ecosystem, which means that it’s vital to share the knowledge in that ecosystem as much as possible.

You’re also doing a session about innovation and the open cloud. What will you explore here?

DeKoenigsberg: Innovative software is becoming more and more about scale, especially in open source. Innovators want to know that they can start small and cheap, and then grow to be huge and distributed. Open source has proven to excel in precisely this way, and we will talk about the tools in the open source world that help innovators move down that path.

Why do you think open source and collaboration are essential to cloud computing?

DeKoenigsberg: One could more correctly say that, in this day and age, open source and collaboration are essential to computing. Cloud computing is simply an extension of that.

Where does Eucalyptus see the open cloud space a year from now?

DeKoenigsberg: Larger and stronger deployments of private clouds in production environments, built on open source. More and more legitimate hybrid cloud deployments with enterprise users choosing increasingly to “buy the base and rent the spike.”

What do you say to those critics that say openness is a minor priority in cloud computing?

DeKoenigsberg: Saying that openness is a minor priority is really saying that *choice* is a minor priority. It’s often the case the people who don’t want you to think about choices are the ones who are trying to limit your choices in the first place.