Eucalyptus to be Included in Next Ubuntu Release

One of the obstacles we identified in our paper was API-based vendor lock-in: If you've written your application to run on a particular cloud, and especially if you have automated management and provisioning tools, moving to a different provider, with different APIs, can be a significant expense. Mark Shuttleworth recently announced on the Ubuntu Developers mailing list that the next release of Ubuntu, Karmic Koala, "aims to keep free software at the forefront of cloud computing by embracing the API's of Amazon EC2, and making it easy for anybody to set up their own cloud using entirely open tools." Specifically they will be including support for Eucalyptus, the University of California, Santa Barbara project that allows operators to provide an EC2 compatible API to their own cluster. While there are a number of other efforts to create a standard this is definitely a step towards the adoption of the EC2 API as a de facto standard. To the best of our knowledge, this makes EC2's API the first one with a second implementation -- an open source implementation, to boot.