Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services
is both a
Cloud Service Provider and a
Platform Service Provider.
Through its EC2 service, Amazon offers one the ability to instantiate
compute resources programmatically or via a control console. Numerous
developers and even Amazon's own team have developed simple scripting
tools that encapsulate the APIs to make them simple to use. In
addition, Amazon also provides something called Elastic Block Storage
(EBS), allowing one to allocate virtually unlimited block storage
capacity and associate that capacity with a given running instance. (An
"instance" is a term used to refer to a virtual machine). All addresses
within EC2 are private addresses, but public addresses may be allocated
and statically assigned to instances. Amazon handles the routing of all
traffic from the Internet destined for the public address to the private
address of the instance. It is also possible to employ Amazon's load
balancers across multiple running instances to reach "Internet Scale".
Amazon also has a number of tools that fall into the platform category,
including database storage (SimpeDB), a storage service called S3 that
offers unlimited file storage capacity, a message queuing service (SQS),
a high-performance SQL database service (RDS), a content delivery
service (CloudFront), and services to facilitate complex data processing
functions (MapReduce).
Citrix
Citrix provides virtualization software and is
the sponsor of the open source project virtualization software
Xen. They offer software solutions
for both server and desktop virtualization, and allow one to build private
and public clouds.
CloudSwitch
CloudSwitch is focused on enabling an
enterprise to migrate application to the cloud simply, securely, without
re-architecting the application or changing the management tool.
Enomaly
Enomaly makes software they describe as
"cloud in a box", enabling telcos and hosting providers to deliver revenue-generating IaaS cloud computing services to their customers, quickly and easily, with a compelling and highly differentiated feature set.
Eucalyptus Systems
Eucalyptus Systems offers an open source
software infrastructure for implementing on-premise cloud computing
using an organization's own information technology (IT)
infrastructure, without modification, special-purpose hardware or
reconfiguration. The software support a number of different hypervisors,
including Xen, KVM, vSphere, ESX, and ESXi, as well as the ability
to allow one's on-premise clooud interact with a public cloud like
Amazon's EC2 service.
The company sponsors the open source project that shares the same name:
Eucalyptus - Elastic Utility Computing
Architecture Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems. The software was
originally produced as part of a project at UC Santa Clara.
NetApp
NetApp is heavily focused on network
application and, that certainly means cloud. In the cloud space, NetApp
has offerings in a number of areas, including a platform operating
system, storage systems, security systems, management, and various
communication protocols. NetApp is simply too large and has too many
products to narrowly categorize, but they have virtually everything one
might need in order to build en enterprise (i.e., "private") cloud
solution.
RightScale
RightScale is a provider of cloud
management solutions that enable you to design, deploy, manage, and
automate business-critical applications on the cloud.
vmware
vmware specializes in virtualization.
They provide software that enables server virtualization, as well
as a "cloud operating system" that can manage racks of virtual servers.
vmware offers solutions for both internal and external clouds (both
classified as "private clouds", desktop, and server virtualization.
