Amazon reaches for datacentres with Eucalyptus deal
Amazon and Eucalyptus Systems have entered into a technology partnership that will see Eucalyptus's private cloud technology get API integration with Amazon Web Service, smoothing the process of migrating data between on-premise datacentres and the Amazon cloud.
The partnership should help assuage European companies concerns about the cloud. This is because it gives them the ability to run a complex cloud within their on-premise datacentre that is fully compatible with Amazon Web Services, James Governor, chief analyst at Redmonk, told ZDNet UK on Thursday when the announcement was made.
"European companies at the moment are more concerned about the US government having access to their business information than they are blackhats," Governor said. "A lot of organisations want something that's on-premise."
He said the "hugely significant" agreement should see Eucalyptus open up a lead over its open-source alternate, OpenStack.
"OpenStack is the new Android," Governor said, echoing remarks made by Netflix's cloud architect Adrian Cockcroft.
Amazon and Eucalyptus have agreed to develop APIs amenable to each other's technology. This means data can easily be migrated from Eucalyptus to Amazon and vice versa. By doing this, Amazon has given companies a choice of what to run their cloud on, without locking them out of its cloud.
"Enterprises can now take advantage of a common set of APIs that work with both AWS and Eucalyptus, enabling the use of scripts and other management tools across both platforms without the need to rewrite or maintain environment-specific versions," Terry Wise, director of the AWS Partner Ecosystem, said.
"Additionally, customers can leverage their existing skills and knowledge of the AWS platform by using the same, familiar AWS SDKs and command-line tools in their existing datacentres," he added.
There could also be an antitrust component to the agreement, Governor said. AWS has not revealed the size of its customer base, but industry observers think of it as the largest public cloud service.
As it grows further, the company could be trying to assuage antitrust concerns from regulators by partnering with other companies, rather than developing private cloud technologies itself.
"Next time Amazon is talking to the EU and the EU says 'what about antitrust?', Amazon can say to the EU 'what do you mean about antitrust - we're creating a third-party ecosystem,'" he said. "[Amazon] don't want to piss around having to deal with on-premises stuff, that's the last thing they want to do; their expectation is that organisations will work with Eucalyptus and in the future might say 'screw Eucalyptus' and go all Amazon."