Andy Oram is the Editor over at O'Reilly, a few weeks ago when vCloud was announced he spoke to Bill Shelton, Director of Cloud Computing at VMware.

Andy's details of the interview and analysis can be found in this posting, vCloud: VMware adapts to cloud computing.

Much of the information is familiar to the recent VMTN podcast on cloud last week.

VMware's announcements in regard to cloud computing a couple weeks ago represent an important industry shift and deserve attention without trivializing.

Oram outlines the API under development (moving from SOAP to REST based), the new vServices such as chargeback and SLAs (he does not refer to it as Beehive), vApp and OVF.

One interesting element is the following.

Partnering is critical to vCloud deployment. On the
vendor side, VMware is working with a large collection of partners--the vast
majority of whom have shown interest in vCloud--to offer services over it. On
the format side, by supporting a standard XML format, VMware can interoperate
with other management services such as rPath.

There have been a few press type releases about rPath over the last month but I have not seen much about it in the VMware community.

rPath have tools to package applications for running on various cloud providers. They do this by combining your application with just enough operating system (JeOS) for it to run on a hypervisor as a virtual appliance. From the same build they can produce an image to run on multiple hypervisors such ESX, or EC2; you can run then internally or out on a cloud provider. They don’t support Google AppEngine as it’s not based on a hypervisor, as discussed by rPaths founder (see the April 17 entry at Bill’s blog). Given this, supporting Microsoft’s announced Azure Cloud is going to be difficult for rPath as well. Still if ISVs go down the rPath route they have flexible appliances that can in effect be rolled into whatever flavor cloud is right for their business model. This is good for VMware, as they want to be able to run a wide variety of use cases for cloud computing.

All interesting stuff, however lets make sure that our datacenters are running VDC-OS well and reaping its benefits. Then once the vCloud API gets implemented we can take advantage of internal and external clouds for both current and future workloads.