About 15 months ago I asked the question in the title of this blog post about an open source project from UC Santa Barbara called Eucalyptus (Does Eucalyptus Have a Commercial Future?). Eucalyptus did indeed go on to become a commercial company funded by top-tier VC Benchmark Capital and BV Capital.
A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from Jonathan Kupferman, a master's student at that same university -- UCSB -- who is one of the team members on a project called AppScale. As Jonathan eloquently explains:
The main idea behind AppScale is to create an open source version of Google AppEngine to allow people to deploy their AppEngine applications on their own hardware or in other clouds. It is of course all open source and runs on top of Xen/KVM and both EC2 and Eucalyptus. Perhaps the simplest way to explain AppScale is: AppScale is to Google AppEngine what Eucalyptus is to Amazon EC2.
Is someone out there working on an open source implementation of the Rackspace Cloud API or Microsoft Azure?
