Current APIs and Offerings

Virtual Platform

- Google App Engine (Google)

- Azure (Microsoft)

- EC2 / S3    (Amazon)

- ECP  ( Enomaly)

- ?       (Rackspace)

___________________________________

App Side (?)

- SalesForce

Google App Engine

- 1 Click Deploy

- Bindings for Python

- Bindings for Java [not complete] [Beta]

- No CPanel

- Beta or 1.0ish

- Lots of Tutorials

- Integrates with all of their services (Google Docs, Google Earth, etc)

- Looks local to you

- free to start/then scales to a pay model

- only pay for execution

- locked into Google APIs  [propriety libraries] (com.google. ...)

- have their own Authentication Process

- can use the REST model

AZURE

- Window Server 2008 with HyperV

- ASP.net Apps (C#)

- They have a fabric manager

- you can take applications (through visual studio) and target them to the cloud and they work

- located in Redding, WA USA (no international locations yet)

- Beta (not released yet)

- gossip that they will be around 12.5 cents/hour

- AZURE includes virtual earth, cloud, message bus (MSNQ?), SQLServer, LiveMesh

- can talk to other tables in the cloud

EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and S3 (Simple Storage Service)

- Amazon Servers

- XEN Based

- S3 has NFS mounting options

- S3 has web service options

- S3 has month Data Costs

-  Rightscale is a GUI front in tool for EC2

- Basic Model: you are purchasing a virtual machine which you can configure pretty much as you like

- 12.5 cents /hour/instance

- 1 GByte upload to S3 was 10 cents slashed to 3cents

- has been some downtime (discussion on critical apps)

- concern about helpdesk

- SLA (Service Level Agreement) will be very important here

ECP (Enomaly Compute Platform)

- XEN or KVN

- Really a service for setting up your own cloud

Rackspace

- 1.5 cents/hour

- Python

- Restful APIs

- Question about how hard it is to start another instance

SalesForce

- trust.salesforce.com

- APP Exchange

- APEX (above and beyond CRM)

- Will host your web site and integrate into their APIs

- AppExchange.com  has application exchange

- Really and example of a vertical cloud