Canonical’s AWSOME bridges Amazon and OpenStack clouds

Canonical’s AWSOME bridges Amazon and OpenStack Clouds

Canonical today released for beta testing a new cloud proxy, providing APIs for OpenStack that are also common to Amazon’s EC2 and AWS public cloud services. The proxy, called “Any Web Service Over Me” (AWSOME), simplifies the deployment of hybrid cloud workloads across AWS and OpenStack clouds.

The OpenStack community has made innovation in IAAS APIs a core strength of the project, and long term users of OpenStack will want to embrace the native APIs in order to make the most of OpenStack’s functionality.

AWSOME translates IAAS requests from the AWS protocol to OpenStack’s native protocols, reinforcing the commitment in the OpenStack community to robust OpenStack protocols while enabling users of AWS to access OpenStack clouds without significant porting efforts. “I applaud all efforts to improve AWS compatibility for OpenStack” said Vish Ishaya, Lead Architect of OpenStack Nova, for Rackspace. “AWSOME adds to the momentum of the OpenStack APIs, enabling OpenStack to focus on innovation”.

Canonical leads and provides commercial support for Ubuntu, the reference platform OS for OpenStack deployments. As a result, Canonical today supports multiple public and private cloud deployments of OpenStack on Ubuntu. AWSOME grew from the requirements of Canonical customers deploying OpenStack clouds, and Canonical’s own needs as a substantial user of both Amazon and OpenStack clouds. Canonical’s solution covers the typical needs of those deploying OpenStack who have already invested in AWS-based tools.

“OpenStack is the leading open source cloud infrastructure, and Canonical is delighted to contribute a tool that accelerates the evaluation, testing and deployment of OpenStack amongst organisations that already use AWS.” said Dave Walker, Ubuntu Server Infrastructure Lead at Canonical. “The challenge set by members of the OpenStack community was to simplify the requirement on OpenStack components to provide both legacy APIs and innovative pure-OpenStack APIs, without introducing new APIs altogether. This work meets that challenge and we’re appreciative of the support from leading members of the OpenStack community in shaping it that way,” added Martin Packman, a member of the AWSOME development team at Canonical.

Randy Bias, co-founder and CTO of Cloudscaling, a leading provider of Ubuntu-based, OpenStack-powered cloud infrastructure solutions, commented; “support for Amazon Web Services compatibility is a critical component of the OpenStack ecosystem and hence important for our customers. This contribution from Canonical provides a compelling option for AWS API support and makes clear the priority that the OpenStack community places on Amazon compatibility.”

AWSOME is an installation option for Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS. It is an open-source project led by Canonical with compliance, support and assurance available to Canonical customers. AWSOME is developed at https://launchpad.net/awsome. For more details, please visit: www.ubuntu.com/cloud/awsome.