An alternative to Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine, in a sense

May 12, 2010 15:10 GMT  ·  By
Yahoo's cloud offering will be an alternative to Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine, in a sense
   Yahoo's cloud offering will be an alternative to Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine, in a sense

Cloud computing is becoming big business, but moving beyond the hype, most people have problems defining what the ‘cloud‘ is. As with any new hip tech term, it has been misused and distorted. Still, when you say Amazon EC2 or Google App Engine, there’s little doubt that these are the real deal. A new name is about to join the two in a way and, surprisingly perhaps, it’s Yahoo.

Most people tend to forget, but Yahoo has some serious tech cred and plenty of talented people working for it on the engineering side. The company now plans to open source part of its internal infrastructure, specifically the component that is used to serve ‘computing power‘ to its developers, The Register reports. Known internally as the ‘Cloud,’ it’s an interesting mix of technologies, one that could potentially prove enticing for people looking to deploy their own private clouds.

The technology provides on-demand access to processing power abstracting the actual machines running underneath. It also handles the load-balancing and comes with security features, enabling the developer to focus on the actual application. However, it still gives the developers some pretty low-level access, freeing them to use any tools and programming language they prefer.

This comes in contrast to both Amazon and Google’s approach. Amazon provides developers pre-configured virtual machines and nothing else. This means that every app has to do its own housekeeping and handle all of the auxiliary tasks. Google’s App engine on the other hand provides a very abstract interface and limits the languages the developers can use and how they can access the service.

Yahoo is set to open source its own technology early next year. If it proves interesting, it may be a competitor to other open-source offerings out there, notably Eucalyptus which uses the Amazon EC2 API. Yahoo has a history of using open source projects for its infrastructure; notably, it is the biggest supporter of Hadoop, an open-source framework based on Google’s MapReduce and the Google File System.