And their hard work has certainly paid off, as today we release another small but important update to Extility.  It squashes around 50 minor bugs, and brings with it a couple of significant improvements as well…

Admin API Improvements

For those of you keen to integrate your existing backoffice platforms into Extility, we continue to make significant progress with the Admin API, adding more and more functionality. Various improvements have been made in this release, full details of which are available in the Admin API Documentation.

Disk/Image Uploading

As usual, we continue to endeavour to make life as easy as possible for our customers and their end users. Although ours is probably the world’s easiest system to upload new images to already, we’ve now added the ability to automatically convert qcow, qcow2 and VMDK files on the fly when you upload them, as well as the existing raw and ISO images. You won’t need to do anything else.

So all in all, some exciting developments. If you would like to try Extility, you can download the free trial here, or contact us if you would like more information on what Extility can do for you. In the meantime work continues on the next big release of Extility, which we are still keeping underwraps for now, but we will start to show you sneak previews of it very soon. We can’t wait!

Cloud Expo Europe is Europe’s longest running cloud computing and virtualisation event, boasting a fantastic line up of the industry’s leading users, service providers and experts.

Visit us at stand 831 to find out how we can help you deploy your own cloud in a matter of hours.

Pocock has a strong background in the IT and financial services industries and a track record of building and managing successful business, both listed and venture backed. As CEO of IT services company Druid Group, Pocock built the company from revenues of zero to £60 million culminating in a £760 million disposal in 2000. An experienced chairman and non-executive director, Pocock holds chairmanships at software company Cognito, Maven Income and Growth Venture Capital Trust, and Electric and General Investment Trust. John previously served as a non-executive director of Xansa plc.

An experienced CEO, Entrepreneur and board member, Knox has successfully started, grown and sold a number of innovative software companies over the past 20 years including Eclectic Group, and Gamut Technologies. His vision, leadership, track record and insight into the value proposition and requirements of both large enterprises and start-ups will be invaluable to the growth of Flexiant over the coming months as he refocuses the company and positions it for growth.

George Knox explains: “The strategic focus of Flexiant is changing now from developing a product and bringing on early customers to taking that product to market. Flexiant has developed world class technology and my role is to ensure we become a recognised leader in the fast growing Cloud Automation software market. I am proud to be part of the team and look forward to the challenges ahead.”

The company’s flagship software product, Extility, allows service providers to build their own cloud easily and automate the provisioning of the service.

John Pocock says: “Flexiant has carved a powerful and pioneering position in the cloud computing sector and I am proud to be joining the team here. I bring with me an obsession for strategic planning and believe passionately in the importance of board effectiveness to delivering business success. I trust my experience and skills will be a real boon to Flexiant’s business.”

The original founders of Flexiant, Tony Lucas and Alex Bligh, retain key roles in the company with Alex Bligh, co-founder of Flexiant and previously CEO, becoming COO and CTO. Bligh says: “Bringing John Pocock and George Knox on board is a real coup for Flexiant. Their background of delivering aggressive growth strategies will be critical to their roles here. This is an exciting time for Flexiant and we are delighted they have joined us to be part of our future.”

We’re about to see a shift – a tipping point in the way customers access cloud services.

Although there is a great deal of talk about companies ‘bursting’* to the cloud whenever they need extra capacity, in reality, there has been little mention of the fact that it’s actually quite difficult to do.

Transferring data and applications back and forth over the internet is cumbersome and, to date has been holding things back. Now, however, I believe we’re about to see a rapid move towards direct connections into data centres with a corresponding rise in cloud use in general.

For such a fast moving, supposedly agile industry, IT provision can be actually quite slow to change its ways. New technologies may become available but don’t tend to take off until the market hits a sudden point of awareness… then everything changes.

The recent launch by Amazon of its AWS Direct Connect service is a case in point. Instead of using the internet to connect to its
services, Amazon is offering clients a dedicated network connection to shift data and applications between their own data centres and those of AWS. It’s faster, cheaper and more reliable… And it’s starting to make people think about what integrated networks can do.

Actually, the technology behind it all is not that new. Suppliers – including Flexiant – have been offering similar services since 2009 but they simply haven’t taken off. It takes a new development from a big company (such as Amazon) to jolt the market into thinking differently.

I really believe the market is about to explode. If the use of direct connects or other integrated network solutions doesn’t go through a 1000% growth rate during the next five years, I’ll be astonished. Admittedly, that’s actually quite a safe bet, given the low numbers at the moment! But within five years, most enterprises over, say, 200 employees will be connecting to the cloud that way – the cloud will simply be part of their server estate.

To be fair, though, it won’t be entirely down to products such as Amazon’s AWS Direct Connect. The shift in the market is also taking place as a result of other major developments – helping to kick-start this change.

Firstly, connectivity’s getting cheap enough and good enough to make it viable. The other day I saw an offer of a gigabit-per-second connection, (which is approximately 200 times faster than broadband) for less than £1000 a month. That’s in London, certainly, but even here in Edinburgh you can get a 100 megabit connection for approximately £400 per month.  Faster, cheaper connectivity is definitely enabling the change to direct connection become more possible.

And secondly, AWS Direct Connect isn’t the only new tool being developed – many other service providers have been working in this area, and application developers like CohesiveFT & Cloudswitch are building solutions for companies to achieve integrated networks without direct connections.

In addition, the work being done on VXLAN (virtual extensible local area network) is likely to have a big impact on the uptake of integrated networks too.  The proposed new technology will allow layer 2 over layer 3 connections, similar to a VPN but
more flexible in what it is able to connect to.

The project is being backed by a strong group of industry heavyweights – VMware, Cisco, Arista, Broadcom, Citrix and Red Hat – and responses from across the industry have been fairly positive since the group launched a draft framework last month.

There is no doubt in my mind, that integrated networks into cloud services are about to take off. The technology and the connection speeds are there and we are really going to see some big changes in the coming year. Treating the cloud as just another part of your network, and ‘bursting’ to it whenever you need it, will become the norm.

This is good news for users -and great news for service providers as I think we are going to see exponential growth in the number of companies using external data centres on demand. It’s an exciting time to be involved in cloud…and definitely the time to ‘get connected’.

*Cloud bursting is an application deployment model in which an application runs in a private cloud or data centre and ‘bursts’ into a public when the demand for computing capacity spikes. The advantage of such a hybrid cloud deployment is that an organization only pays for extra compute resources when they are needed.

To give you a bit of background information, these projects are part of the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) for research and technological development. In 2010, our cutting edge cloud platform Extility was selected to be used as a test bed by three of these pan-European projects, and ever since then we have been working in close partnership with Europe’s leading experts in cloud computing to deliver them. Our partners include ATOS Origin, SAP, British Telecom, Telefonica and Orange.

During their visit, our guests were given a breakdown of each of the projects, learning that while they are all based on our Extility platform, the three of them are actually quite different.

The first project, entitled 4CaaSt, will enable the transition of mobile applications to the cloud. A second project, Cumulo Nimbo, will deliver a scalable, transactional, multi-tier Platform as a Service (PaaS), while the third project, OPTIMIS, aims to create a toolkit that will allow companies to move cloud based services easily between different cloud platforms.

At the moment we are about a third of the way through these projects, with the three of them due to conclude in the second half of 2013.

Following his visit, Enterprise Minister Fergus Ewing told how impressed he is with the work we have completed so far. He said: “I’m always delighted to have the opportunity to see the success of an innovative Scottish company like Flexiant.  This company is clearly making its mark across Europe, broadening their reach and interacting with an impressive range of multinational partners.”

MEP Alyn Smith was equally impressed with our work, deeming the work we are doing as, “amongst the best in the world”, while MSP Angela Constance added: “Flexiant has become a real local success story”.

The ministers will tour Flexiant’s headquarters and recently completed datacentre in Livingston. They will also hear more about Flexiant’s important role in three EU projects, valued in total at 20 million euros.

The projects are part of the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) for research and technological development. FP7 bundles together all research-related EU initiatives and plays a crucial role in achieving the goals of growth, competitiveness and employment.

Flexiant launched Europe’s first cloud computing platform in 2007 and remains Europe’s longest standing cloud provider today.  Flexiant’s ground breaking technology, Extility, allows service providers and data centre operators to deliver cloud computing services to their own customers.

Appointed in 2010, following rigorous selection procedures, Flexiant’s cutting edge cloud platform Extility is being used as a test bed by three pan-European FP7 projects, providing a robust proving ground for each of the projects to demonstrate the tools developed are able to run in a real public or private cloud environment.  Flexiant is working in close partnership with Europe’s leading experts in cloud computing brought together to deliver these high profile projects including ATOS Origin, SAP, British Telecom, Telefonica and Orange.

4CaaSt, the first project will enable the transition of mobile applications to the cloud. A second project, Cumulo Nimbo, will create a pan-European cloud platform to give companies throughout the EU a competitive edge, allowing them to complete globally.  The final project, Optimis, aims to create a toolkit that will break down barriers between cloud platforms and allow companies to move cloud based services easily between cloud platforms.

Alex Bligh, Flexiant’s CEO says:  “Today, cloud computing is critical to the evolution of the internet and the way services are delivered. We are delighted that our software is being used to help develop the tools needed for a new generation of cloud platforms.  It is a privilege to work with the EU at this level beside Europe’s information technology leaders.

Cloud computing refers to computers and applications that run remotely and are accessed over the internet. Businesses can use the internet to access virtual IT infrastructures running in large data centres to replace physical PCs and services.  By aggregating the computing needs of many users with a single centre, hosting providers enable significant benefits to their users, such as simpler set up and maintenance, a reduction in capital expenditure, lower operating costs, infinite scalability and a greener carbon footprint.

Enterprise Minister Fergus Ewing said:

“I’m always delighted to have the opportunity to see the success of an innovative Scottish company like Flexiant.  This company is clearly making its mark across Europe, broadening their reach and interacting with an impressive range of multinational partners.

“Their outward focussed approach to business is an excellent example of the type of innovation and creativity we want to encourage in companies throughout Scotland. It fits entirely with the Scottish Government’s belief that ambitious companies have a significant role to play in securing our future economic success and in promoting Scottish talent across the world.”

Alyn Smith, MEP comments:  “It’s good to see a Scottish company seizing some of the opportunities that Europe has to offer.  Flexiant has shown the entrepreneurial drive and ingenuity that helps companies to succeed in today’s marketplace and I’m delighted to be able to congratulate them on securing FP7 funding for three projects.

“I’ll confess that the level of technological innovation on display in companies like this leaves me struggling to keep up sometimes but the confidence of the company and the belief in their potential convinces me that this is a company with a great future.  The software being developed here is amongst the best in the world and Flexiant should be congratulated on their successful work.

“The FP7 programme is funding almost 8000 projects like this across the European Union, and as we now look forward to the next EU research programme in 2013 it is encouraging to see the programme delivering so successfully.  I’d encourage every go-ahead Scottish company to start looking at what help there is available from Europe to help them grow and develop.”

According to Angela Constance MSP:  “Flexiant has become a real local success story and I am delighted to have the opportunity to visit the company’s Livingston base with Fergus Ewing MSP, the Minister for Energy, Enterprise and Tourism, and Alyn Smith MEP, to see at first hand the innovative and exciting cutting edge new technology and software development work that the company is involved in.

“Flexiant is undertaking ground breaking work at both national and international level and has attracted European funding for three EU projects that it participates in. The company’s achievements and products place it at the forefront of new technology developments. I wish it every success for the future.”

And before any of you observant types come back to us asking what happened to version 1.5.1, we didn’t forget about it… 1.5.1 was an internal release only, which concentrated on a few minor enhancements and bug fixes.

WHMCS Support

By far the biggest and most exciting news to report is our new module for WHMCS, which allows you to directly integrate Extility in as a service offering.  WHMCS has a long heritage in the hosting industry, providing a complete solution (after all, that’s what the initials stand for) for companies wanting to sell traditional hosting services.

Although Extility has its own metering and billing system, we have always tried to be as open and flexible as possible with integrating and supporting other platforms. This new development will allow users to add cloud services to their existing portfolio of services while continuing to use WHMCS.

For more information on how to do this, please contact us and we will be happy to help you out.

Enhancements

As well as this new feature, we have also fixed various small bugs and made minor enhancements to the 1.5 version. Full details of these are available in the release notes, which registered users can download here.

All in all, some interesting news from the Flexiant camp today.  If you are interested in trying Extility, you can download the free trial here, or contact us for more information. Also remember to keep your eyes peeled for further information on Extility 1.6, due to be announced shortly, along with the big UI announcement we promised you a while back. We’ll keep you posted…

Flexiant is the company behind Extility, the world’s most advanced Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Cloud Computing Software. Due to the growth and development of the company, we are recruiting a Senior Software Support Engineer.

Our support team is responsible for diagnosing and remedying any queries or issues our customers have with our software, as well as managing installations, planned upgrades, and QA. As a Senior Support Engineer, you will be jointly responsible for all these, but also help lead our support team through the exciting and challenging times ahead.

Our software is modular, and predominantly written in Java, with some C and PHP. It runs on Ubuntu Linux. Our customers are typically hosting providers, data center operators, managed service providers, and telecommunications companies. They use our software to offer cloud services to their own customers, so delivering a professional reliable service is very important to us.

If you are the right candidate, you will be hard-working, intuitive, and analytical. You will have a strong problem solving capability and a positive can do attitude. You will be dependable and be able to work under pressure. You will have great communications skills (both to customers and internally) and excellent English. Above all, you will be dedicated to providing first class service to our customers. You will need the ability to inspire and motivate a team, and ideally have previous team leader experience. You will enjoy creation of documentation and internal FAQs, and spreading your knowledge to your colleagues. You will need to be flexible and to take whatever is thrown at you (we’re a small company after all), and to work independently. You will have a ravenous appetite to learn in this fast-paced industry.

Finding a person matching the above is more important to us than technical skills, but you will really struggle unless you have a good grasp of all (or nearly all) of the following technical skills:

• Excellent working knowledge of SQL.
• Good knowledge of Unix / Linux system admin and system profiling
• Ability to read and understand source code (Java, C and PHP);  you need not be a programmer, but you will often need to debug issues to a code level.
• Basic shell scripting
• Basic understanding of networking and virtualisation.
• Understand the concept of web Services.

If you have any of the following, that would be great (otherwise you will need to learn fast):

• Ubuntu / Debian system adminstration.
• Basic windows system administration
• VMware
• SAN Storage and iSCSI
• TCP/IP and Ethernet packet level debugging

There will be some on call work involved.

We offer a competitive salary (we think probably between £30,000 and £35,000) with benefits including stock options, private health insurance and gym membership. We have recently refurbished our offices in Livingston and run a company with a relaxed and friendly atmosphere.

If you think you have the right skills and attitude to work for us and to join our growing business, please send your CV in confidence to jobs@flexiant.com

We are not currently interested in hearing from recruitment agencies, so please do not email us.

This Testlab deployment is a collaboration between Interxion, Flexiant, Boston Limited and GTT and acts as an online proof-of-concept (PoC) environment for cloud service providers. It can be used for testing scenarios before deploying a cloud infrastructure with the proof-of-concept being run on a reference architecture. This Testlab offers a framework that supports multiple hypervisors and allows service providers to build both private and public clouds.

The new test environment is located in Interxion’s City of London data centre and will deploy Flexiant’s Extility platform solution, have network connectivity via GTT and be housed on Supermicro® hardware provisioned by Boston Limited. From 17 November 2011 onwards, users can access this Cloud Testlab deployment online via Interxion’s Website and test the PoC free of charge for a limited period.

Greg McCulloch, UK Managing Director, Interxion, commented, “The rapid adoption of cloud computing has seen cloud-based services become a central part of business strategy. The launch of this UK Cloud Testlab deployment further reflects our commitment to the cloud and offers both customers and prospects the opportunity to test and develop cloud services at high speed and with best-in-class performance guarantees.”

“Flexiant enables hosting companies to compete in the cloud computing virtualisation sector on a level playing field with global market leaders who have proprietary, rapid-provisioning infrastructures,” said Robert Karssiens, Director Sales & Marketing at Flexiant. “Extility is a proven, credible and visionary alternative to the cost of developing a cloud computing platform in-house with real time user interface and in-built billing engines capabilities.”

“We are delighted that Interxion has chosen Boston Limted and Supermicro® as hardware providers for the launch of this Cloud Testlab,” said Manoj Nayee, Managing Director of Boston Limited. “Boston Limited has been developing high performance, energy efficient solutions in conjunction with Supermicro® for nearly 20 years, and our latest offerings for the cloud arena incorporate advanced software features to create Enterprise class solutions, giving your business the ability to scale processing capabilities that mirror your exact requirements to save you space, power and money.”

“Network connectivity is a key, but often forgotten, building block for cloud computing” said Andy Johnson, Chief Strategy Officer of GTT. “Our reliable and scalable bandwidth solutions deliver the performance demanded by the end users in accessing a cloud computing environment, ensuring the benefits of such services are not hindered by poor usability. Our goal is to design network solutions that allow the Enterprise to access public, private and hybrid cloud solutions in a way that enhances the capabilities and benefits of them, rather than allowing the network to be the bottleneck. The UK Cloud Testlab is an excellent concept and we are pleased to be working with Interxion.”

What is the point of API support?

An API is the licensee’s route to interoperability and extensibility. We are big fans of open systems, and interoperability and extensibility in particular, so we are in general big fans of APIs. And that means both our own, and interoperating with other API designs where it’s sensible to do so. The rest of this article should be read in that context.

Which API?

Most attention focuses on the ‘customer API’, by which I mean the API that end users use to manipulate their virtual resources. But this isn’t the only API that matters. As a service provider, it is just as important that you, and your resellers, can programatically control your own environment. Here are the main types of APIs we have (other cloud infrastructure software should be similar):

• Customer facing API – allowing end users to orchestrate their own virtual resources.
• Administrative API – allowing you and your resellers suitably segregated access to customer and billing information, creation and deletion of customers, etc.
• Cluster Control API – allowing system administrators to manipulate both physical and virtual resources (for instance taking nodes on and off line).

For completeness, we actually have two APIs in the third category, and a number of less important internal APIs. We publish many of our APIs here.

We talk to some licencees who do not plan initially to give their end users access to a customer facing UI at all, let alone an API. But they do plan to automate internally. Some cloud purists will claim this ‘isn’t cloud’. Well, we can have that argument elsewhere, but clearly they are using cloud infrastructure software, and for them the second two categories of API are more important than the first. Similarly, the fact service providers actually need to make some money from cloud occasionally gets forgotten, and the importance of the administrative API above is underplayed by people making that mistake.

That said, for the rest of this article, I am going to talk about the customer facing API.

Who uses APIs?

Cloud evangelists sometimes see the world through their cloudy glasses, and assume that every cloud user is a paid-up convert to the cloud religion. This is not the case. Not every cloud user uses cloud techniques in every aspect of their usage of the cloud. In particular, not every end user exclusively runs massively scalable self-sizing autonomic applications written for the cloud. Our observations are that if you give your end users a decent web interface, very few users (well under 10%) will actually use your API at all. That’s not because the API does not have full coverage; indeed our UI uses our customer facing API to perform all virtual resource manipulation, and there are a few things you can do through the API but not the UI (but not vice versa), so it can’t be that. It’s because most users currently orchestrate the resources themselves manually. Point and click is just easier than APIs. The figures are a little different if you measure by percentage of actions taken, as large customers and customers with volatile usage patterns are more likely to have machine-driven automated orchestration. But these are comparatively rare in number (though the larger ones may be a significant proportion of revenue), and even with these, we tend to see a mixture of API and UI use. If you provide a poor or incomplete UI, no doubt more customers will use your API instead. If a cloud service provider tells me most customers use his API rather than his UI, my first thought will be that he must have a dreadful UI, not that he must have a fantastically interesting customer base.

Conversely, we’ve seen some pretty unexpected API use, including an end-user who surprised us with a completely new UI he’d written himself.

My personal take is that the importance of APIs to day is sometimes overstated. However, as more end users migrate towards more cloud-like applications, API usage will become more important.

API standards, eco-systems and differentiation

The reason for providing a customer facing API is to allow end-users to orchestrate their virtual resources. However, most customers do not want to write the software talking to your API from scratch. They’d thus prefer it follows a standard. The commonly held view is that in terms of deployment prevalence, there is only one API that matters (Amazon’s EC-2 API), so everyone should support that. That’s a huge oversimplification in my view. Here are some things to think about if you are service provider looking to offer cloud services:

• The industry does not yet have any standard with any deployment traction for description of virtual resources, let alone standards for those virtual resources themselves. The EC-2 API therefore unsurprisingly allows end users only to provision and deprovision resources that are (essentially) the Amazon EC-2 product set or copies thereof, and only in the manners permitted by Amazon. Therefore, if the EC-2 API is your only API, you cannot differentiate your product from Amazon’s. In fact, you can only offer a subset of their product range. And every API change will mean you need to run to keep up. Being able to offer an undifferentiated subset of the market leader’s product range without their economies of scale seems to me a commercially unattractive proposition.
• The world would be a better place if there were a standardised extensible open standard for cloud provisioning. There are some in development. None has any significant deployment traction. OpenStack is probably the most interesting, but it’s not yet stable.
• Supporting other APIs (or rather a subset of other APIs sufficient to allow common tools to work) is, however, a useful goal. Lots of EC-2 toolsets make a limited number of calls (“is this server still running?”, “start this”, “stop that”) and an EC-2 compatibility layer would allow these to work on other platforms. We are looking at adding an EC-2 compatibility layer, and may well do something with OpenStack too. However, we would not recommend our customers tell their end users to use this as their main interface, as necessarily it will only give access to a subset of the features of their platform, i.e. it will offer limited richness. It will, just like everyone else’s EC-2 compatibility interfaces, only offer a subset of the functionality of the EC-2 API, snapshotted at one particular point in time. However, this does provide access to existing toolset eco-systems.
• Another way to get access to eco-systems is to have an easy to use API that allows use of the platform API to be integrated into other products, particular open source ones. As we license our product, rather than run a single instance of it, this increases the incentive for this to happen. For a recent example, see our integration with Standing Cloud.
• An edit: After I first published this, it was pointed out to me that I hadn’t mentioned that yet another way of gaining access is to use an abstraction layer, like libcloud/cloudkick, jclouds, or Deltacloud. The idea here is that the service provider (or software vendor in the case of those licensing software) provides code for the an abstraction layer which offers a cloud-backend-API independent API to tool chains and orchestration systems. However, the two main problems any service provider or software vendor faces here are as follows. First, the number of potentially useful looking abstraction layers (more than one) exceeds the number of potential useful looking APIs to emulate (one at present); even by implementing support in all of these, you get access only to a fraction of the universe of cloud API users, because most don’t use these libraries. If one (or even two) of these abstractions layers wins out as the common standard, that will be great, but I don’t yet know which one if any will (and neither does anyone else), so the effort to implement each has to be really very low indeed to make it worth spending time on this rather than simply emulating EC-2 (which means we get some degree of support for free in the abstraction layers anyway). Second, there is a risk that you end up only presenting a ‘lowest common denominator’ of functionality to the end user (i.e. it exacerbates the ‘subset of functionality’ problem above). There’s also the more philosophical question: is a competing ecosystem of cloud abstraction layers on top of a competing ecosystem of cloud APIs really better than a single, widely accepted, open, extensible industry-standard protocol? My feeling is it complicates things hugely. I would really like to be proved wrong on this one; this is an area we have our eyes on too.
• The API is not the only technical barrier to cloud ecosystems. For images to be compatible, you need the Metadata service to be compatible (we emulate most parts of EC-2′s metadata service as well as providing our own), you need the disk storage models to be compatible (ours are a little different from Amazon, more like a standard server, but many images can be made to work), and you need your image to be constructed in a compatible manner. On the last point, EC-2 uses the Xen hypervisor in PV mode, with kernels provided outside the image. We use Xen in HVM mode, KVM, or VMware, and expect kernels to be provided within the image. It’s perfectly possible to provide an image that works with each of these (Ubuntu’s UEC images are a case in point), but some image providers don’t. In some cases, the image provider has had matters made more difficult by factors outside her control and largely outside the control of the Service Provider or IaaS software vendor. For the technically minded, look, for instance at the oscillating drivers for and device names of paravirtualised disks under Xen in Linux; it is, I believe, impossible, to provide a single image that provides paravirtualised disks reliably on every Xen version and presents the same disk names (and that’s just one hypervisor). I don’t want to over-emphasise the difficulty here, because it is possible (see our integration with Standing Cloud, or, to pick another example, RightScale and Rackspace); it’s just not as easy as it might be. To my mind, image compatibility is possibly more important for ecosystems than API compatibility at this stage. Awareness by the linux distribution vendors of different cloud stacks is improving this situation.

Conclusion

API interoperability is hugely important. But, my own view is that cloud technology has not yet reached a level of maturity where we should as an industry be nailing our standard to the mast of any particular cloud API. We do not yet have industry wide standards for the resources themselves, so it seems to me that APIs will continue to be in a state of flux. However, give it a couple of years, and things may be different. I hope by then as an industry we will have a sensible neutral, open, extensible standard. In the mean time, we’d love to here from people who are interested in working with our APIs. And we’ll be adding support for a useful subset of the EC-2 API (the de-facto standard), whilst keeping our eye on other opportunities – particularly OpenStack.