If you look out on the web, you can find tons of articles comparing and contrasting the cloud offerings from Amazon Web Services and VMware. But you may not find many tweets that articulate the differences well in 140 characters or less. Today, I came across a set of tweets from George Reese, CTO of enStratus, where he articulated the difference between the offerings from Amazon and VMware succinctly when he was discussing about Cloud API standards. I thought I should share it with the readers of Cloud Ave and hence this short weekend post (quotes).
AWS has taken the approach that the cloud is something new and should reflect innovation in the way we think about IT components.
vCloud has taken the approach of abstracting that traditional data center and making it cloudy.
I think it is a pretty good way to differentiate these two services. Both approaches have their own pros and cons and we cannot dismiss one over the other just like that. But a clear understanding of this difference is key to any debate on how the cloud standards should emerge.
