Picture Credit: Minnpost.comIf 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. 
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Krishnan Subramanian

Krish dons several avatars including entrepreneur in exile, analyst cum researcher, technology evangelist, blogger, ex-physicist, social/political commentator, etc.. My main focus is research and analysis on various high impact topics in the fields of Open Source, Cloud Computing and the interface between them. I also evangelize Open Source and Cloud Computing in various media outlets, blogs and other public forums. I offer strategic advise to both Cloud Computing and Open Source providers and, also, help other companies take advantage of Open Source and Cloud Computing. In my opinion, Open Source commoditized software and Cloud Computing commoditized computing resources. A combination of these two developments offers a strong competitive advantage to companies of all sizes and shapes. Due to various factors, including fear, the adoption of both Open Source and Cloud Computing are relatively slow in the business sector. So, I take it upon myself to clear any confusion in this regard and educate, enrich and advise users/customers to take advantage of the benefits offered by these technologies. I am also a managing partner in two consulting companies based in India. I blog about Open Source topics at http://open.krishworld.com and Cloud Computing related topics at http://www.cloudave.com.

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