But who?

Libcloud.  If VMware is all really all about freedom, it needs to work with other efforts equally invested in user freedom, and libcloud is all about provider flexibility.

Wait. What’s libcloud?

Libcloud aims to be a unified interface to cloud (infrastructure) providers. It’s company/provider agnostic, and speaks to provider API’s. It’s built for people who need to to talk to the cloud that they don’t own, like EC2, Slicehost, etc. (Yes, other projects have the same vision, and many want to standardize the cloud, but frankly libcloud has gotten farther than anybody, in less time than anybody, with real code living sitting in github right now.).
The main user/sponsor of libcloud is Cloudkick, who makes a really nice monitoring/management dashboard for popular providers (BTW, I really recommend Cloudkick, no affiliation.)

VMware totally wants tools like Cloudkick to work with vCloud Express providers.

Cloudkick reboot screen

Libcloud can already do a lot of basic management tasks with a growing list of providers.

infrastructure providers libcloud currently supports

But what if libcloud worked with the potentially hundreds of vCloud Express providers that will exist shortly?

infrastructure providers libcloud could support with vCloud Express interface

The way the libcloud project is working right now, there’s basically one rep from each provider helping to make an interface to libcloud.  With just a little bit of engineering time, VMware has the power to make an interface that would result in compatibility with 100’s (1000’s?) of providers.

So what are you waiting for, VMware? Join the libcloud list and get involved.  With a bit of effort you can some street cred for vCloud Express’s mission, without changing any of your technology, adding a ton of value to all your provider partners.

In plain English: Today VMware outlined a service where you can pay a 3rd party host your VMware guests. They also released an API that would make it so you wouldn’t have to switch management suites when you switched providers. Or decided later on to host your VM’s yourself. The hosting service is called vCloud Express, and it currently includes 5 providers, expected to grow to hundreds (thousands ?). The API is part of their vCloud universe, which includes a lot of other stuff besides vCloud Express.

The most exciting part of this is independence. A customer shouldn’t have to switch software when they grow. Or when they shrink. When they’re focused on agility. When they’re focused on performance. When they’re focused on security. So many software vendors can only have one kind of customer. Though there’s room for improvement, this move by VMware suggests that they’re creating a platform for people to use no matter where’s they’re at.

Industry articles are saying vCloud Express competes directly with Amazon’s EC2 service, and though there is an overlap (you can now pay somebody, not VMware, to host VMware-powered virtual servers), VMware’s strategy is a bit different. They don’t want to be the service provider. They either want to sell you the bits OR sell the provider the bits. But they’re creating a flexible space for the customer, where we don’t have to change technologies or management tools, no matter how much/little involved we are in managing the low-level infrastructure.

I see vCloud Express as more akin to a combination of the open-source/ EC2 API-comptible Eucalyptus and EC2 itself.  Users can grow management process, in-house tools, and 3rd party tools around either a behind-the-firewall Eucalyptus environment or Amazon Ec2, because it’s basically written for the same API.  And if all goes according to plan, VMware vCloud API can achieve the same thing.  A mixed environment with common tools written against the same platform.

I have a million bones to pick with VMware’s cloud approach, and the standard corporate hubris involved in being a late-comer to an established market, and submitting a proprietary reality as a new standard

But for this week, I want to just say, “right on” to VMware.  Though they don’t see it this way, it’s a major course correction, and a great example for other enterprise software vendors.

vCloud Express is off to a great start, and I hope to see its vision of customer freedom truly realized.  If so, its success wouldn’t even be tied to VMware hypervisors…