InfoWorld: Security comes up a lot in almost any discussion around the cloud. How comfortable should users be with the security of the cloud?
Ulander: It is important for end-users to understand that public cloud environments can be architected to offer a very high level of isolation and security, certainly equal to any other managed service. Despite this, it is one of the most common concerns voiced when companies consider moving applications and data to public clouds. Cloud environments, when built correctly, can offer complete isolation between guests at the memory, CPU, storage and network level. Some public cloud providers even are offering "hosted private clouds," in which users are segregated onto their own physical infrastructure to accommodate compliance requirements.
For companies looking to keep everything inside the corporate data center, private clouds can provide this same level of isolation and security. This can be important for organizations that are looking to limit access to environments, or meet specific regulatory requirements for privacy or security.
InfoWorld: What role does open source play within your solution, and how does it fit into your strategy?
Ulander: Cloud.com is an open source company, so open source software plays an enormous role in our product and our company DNA. Our core platform, CloudStack, is an open source product, which can be downloaded. Not only have we made our platform available under the GPLv3 license, we also support many other open source products, including storage platforms, open source hypervisors such as Xen and KVM, and popular Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu and Fedora.
There is incredible demand today for an open source cloud platform that is production quality, feature rich, and easy to administer. With the success we've had building production-quality environments for large organizations, we've learned a lot about building stable and scalable software. We're very excited to put this tool into the public domain and see the different types of use cases that it generates, and we look forward to incorporating lots of feedback and hopefully code contributions from the community.
InfoWorld: This week, you made a big announcement around Cloud.com and open source. Why is this significant, and what can we expect from it moving forward?
Ulander: This week, we announced Cloud.com as our new company name (we were formerly VMOps) as well as our open source, service provider, and enterprise editions of CloudStack, our IaaS cloud management software. This new offering is simple to deploy and yet incredibly feature rich. Because of this, it allows anyone to build, deploy, and manage a massively scalable and multitenant IaaS computing cloud. In addition, we are announcing an open source community where developers can go to share their ideas and realize the potential benefits of CloudStack. Through the implementation of common cloud frameworks like VMware's vCloud initiative and Amazon EC2-style interfaces, CloudStack provides an open environment that interoperates with a user's existing cloud deployment.
Thanks again to Peder Ulander for speaking with me.
This article, "Startup Cloud.com introduces open source IaaS software," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in business technology news and get a digest of the key stories each day in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter and on your mobile device at infoworldmobile.com.