A week after adding API access to its Amazon-esque cloud, Rackspace has now open-sourced these APIs. On Wednesday, the company said it had opened up the specs for both its Cloud Servers APIs and Cloud Files APIs under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

As the industry call for cloud interoperability grows more fervent, open-source enterprise software company Red Hat has submitted its cloud platform, Deltacloud, to the DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) as a potential standard for cloud interoperability, the company said Wednesday. "We do not want Deltacloud to be under the control of any one particular vendor, including Red Hat.

Red Hat's Deltacloud project is developing a open source standardised API for addressing different cloud architectures in a uniform way. Cloud service users can use the Deltacloud API to access Amazon's EC2 as well as private clouds that are based on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation (RHEL-V); drivers for private VMware ESX clouds and the cloud services offered by Rackspace are to follow.

"A few days ago Google announced its App Engine, which lets folks build applications that run in Google’s cloud. Amazon has for a while had a number of services to let folks run applications in Amazon’s cloud. But in both of these cases, one must use their proprietary APIs. [...] I think most would prefer not to be locked-in, that cloud providers instead sold commodity services.

"We're creating a Cloud management engine based on the open source deltaCloud project," Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager of Red Hat's Cloud business, told InternetNews.com. "We haven't yet issued a delivery date for that product, but it will be sometime next year.

Red Hat today officially launched an ambitious new effort called Deltacloud to help abstract away the differences between public and private cloud deployments. Oh and it's all open source too. The way that Red Hat CTO Briand Stevens explains Deltacloud, is that that it will have drivers that map onto Amazon EC@ as well as private clouds that uses VMware or Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat has announced that it is expanding its cloud services offering. Together with Amazon, Red Hat's first Premier Certified Cloud Provider, the company is allowing users to extend their RHEL subscriptions into the cloud using Amazon Web Services

Open APIs, not open source, will protect future freedom of action -- so beware so-called open source cloud offerings

Cloud computing is known as the next big thing in IT. But what is it exactly? In a cloud, the key players are the user and provider. Users have access to the cloud resources in form of (web) services, containing the functionality of software (inside the browser), platforms or infrastructures. Let’s see what’s behind it…