The Great Cloud API Debate

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

At the same time, last week’s debate between Randy Bias, CTO of Cloudscaling, and Boris Renski, CMO and co-founder of Mirantis, scored important points about the value of application programming interfaces (APIs) and cloud architecture. And it dealt at length with the wisdom — or lack thereof — of focusing on Amazon APIs while inside the OpenStack project.

The protagonists are two outspoken members of the cloud community. Bias is known for assuming leading positions in the industry without showing any vestige of faintheartedness. At one point during the debate he said he was advocating Amazon APIs because Rackspace was the source of two core sets of APIs already in OpenStack: those for the Nova compute and Swift storage services. Rackspace’s influence is waning in the open source project, he noted, so he had chosen this moment to "kick it in the teeth" and try to correct Rackspace’s early influence in the project…

Renski, who was more soft-spoken during the debate, is known as one of two OpenStack board members who voted against admission of VMware to the project on the grounds that its interests were incompatible with the success of OpenStack. He also predicted PayPal would become an all-OpenStack shop, replacing VMware, as consultants from the firm he founded, Mirantis, were attempting to make the first PayPal server conversions. PayPal contradicted his statement at the time and announced continued support for VMware…

Read more from the source @ http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/the-great-cloud-api-debate/240160219