Nimbula Director: Tools target Amazon's IaaS

Back in October, I was introduced to Nimbula (see Nimbula - blending with Amazon EC2 if you'd like more information about that conversation.) Since that time, the company has continued to work on their cloud environment and took the opportunity to announce that it would be available shortly at the recent Cloud Connect Conference.

Here's what Nimbula had to say about its Nimbula Director

Today at the Cloud Connect Conference, Nimbula, the Cloud Operating System Company, announced that its flagship product, Nimbula Director, will be generally available within the next 30 days.

Based on Nimbula's Cloud Operating System technology, Nimbula Director delivers Amazon EC2-like services to both enterprises and service providers. Allowing customers to efficiently manage both on- and off-premises resources, Nimbula Director quickly and cost effectively transforms inflexible, inefficient and under-utilized data centers into powerful, easily configurable compute capacity while supporting controlled access to off-premise clouds.

Nimbula Director provides powerful utility-grade cloud features like policy-based authorization, secure multi-tenancy, topology-independent distributed network security (enabling multi-data center scale and while allowing for self service deployment of complex network topologies) and monitoring and metering (enabling next generation, usage driven cost models).

As a cloud software provider, all functionality has been rigorously designed to be highly scalable, automated and managed by a flexible permissions and delegation system. Key features include:

• Zero-touch install of servers – expand the cloud as fast as you can rack the systems
• Self-monitoring and self-healing distributed management control plane
• Self-service workflows that enable end users to do their own developer and deployment activities without any interaction with core IT
• Full featured layer 2 networks which can be allocated to individual customers
• A distributed rule-based layer 3 firewall that is independent of network configuration, site, or even geography
• Federation to Amazon EC2 using the same permissions system that governs access to private cloud resources
For deployments on infrastructure under 40 cores, Nimbula Director will be licensed free of charge. A paid support option will be available for users of the free version. For deployments on infrastructure over 40 cores, Nimbula Director will be licensed on an annual subscription basis, and includes both maintenance and support services.

Snapshot analysis

Although it is clear that Nimbula has fleshed out its plans, I still am concerned about their requirement that organizations develop to a Nimbula specific set of APIs. This means, of course, that IT decision makers have to buy into the concept that they're going to be tied forever to a company that is just releasing its first product. Although the founders have a strong track record of success elsewhere, that success may not carry through to this company. A mitigating factor is that Nimbula is offering tools that allow workloads developed to the Nimbula APIs to move from their cloud environment into Amazon's EC2.

That being said, it appears that the company is offering a set of tools that would be very interesting to those considering developing for Amazon's IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) offerings. If the fact that the APIs and tools are specific to Nimbula isn't a problem to you, it might be worth visiting their website to learn more.