VMware delivers vCloud developer tools
VMware on Wednesday introduced two SDKs designed to help open-source developers create software for 'virtual datacentres' based on the company's vCloud infrastructure.
The company also announced the availability of open-source client libraries and tools for vCloud, including the libcloud Python library and jclouds, a framework supporting Java development across clouds from multiple providers.
vCloud, first announced in September 2009, is VMware's initiative for allowing administrators to manage datacentre resources across on-premises and remote clouds — creating what the company terms a 'virtual datacentre'.
Developers create software for vCloud using the vCloud API, which VMware said in February last year it had submitted to the Distributed Management Task Force for certification as an open standard.
A lower-cost version of vCloud, called vCloud Express and announced in September, offers on-demand, pay-as-you-go computing resources.
The new SDKs (software development kits), supporting Java and Python, are designed to make it easier for developers to create software for the vCloud API, VMware said. VMware competes with a number of well-established rivals on the cloud computing front, including Amazon and Rackspace, but is itself well entrenched in on-premises cloud computing via virtualisation offerings such as vSphere.
Other recently launched services, such as the Xen Cloud Platform, also aim to create a bridge between a business's internal cloud and an external cloud.
Resources such as libcloud and jclouds offer a standardised way of making software compatible with vCloud, VMware said. Cloudera has already used libcloud and VMware's Java SDK to build a vCloud-compatible version of its Apache Hadoop-based offering, VMware added. Hadoop is a Java software framework supporting data-intensive distributed applications.
VMware noted that open-source developer tools such as Ant, a Java build tool, and Apache Maven, a software project management and comprehension tool, have been adapted for use with the vCloud API via the jclouds plugin.