HP have announced the private beta of their HP Cloud service, which you can sign up for here.

They’ve put a few details up in a blog post, mentioning the 2 fairly standard sounding services of HP Cloud Compute and HP Cloud Object Storage

The most interesting thing is really the mention that parts of the HP cloud service are built on OpenStack, the open source instructure software. Assuming HP have stuck to the standard openstack functionality, and expose the openstack APIs, this could be the first of many truly interchangeable public clouds.

I’ve signed up to the beta, and if I get in I’ll do a proper poke around and see just what can be done.

With the launch of VMware’s vFabric Data Director, and the first of many databases that it will manage, vFabric Postgres, it seems VMware have made the first step in differentiating their hosted platform cloudfoundry.com from the open source Cloud Foundry project.

While most of the news and blog posts discussed the impressive technology behind vFabric Data Director and vFabric Postgres (both seem very nice), the SpringSource blog talked about using vFabric Postgres on CloudFoundry.com.

As they put it themselves:

To power the PostgreSQL service on cloudfoundry.com the Cloud Foundry team is using vFabric Postgres 9.0, a vSphere-optimized version of Postgres

While vFabric Postgres and the open source Postgres are currently identical to developers, this seems unlikely to last in the long run, as development streams diverge over time with new version releases and new feature requests – especially when a big part of the Postgres project’s famous reliability comes from their slow and steady development process.

It’s possible that the Cloud Foundry developers will not make use of any features only available in vFabric Postgres, but this seems quite unlikely given that they’re likely to be the ones asking for features to be added in the first place.

Of course, I’m sure it won’t be long until there’s a vFabric Redis, vFabric RabbitMQ, and so on, for all the different VMware owned open source products, and CloudFoundry.com is now likely to adopt them all.

This makes me wonder, in a couple of years will it still be possible to build a private cloud platform comparable to CloudFoundry.com using the code from cloudfoundry.org, and indeed for someone else to build a competitor to cloudfoundry.com, without first licencing closed source code from VMware themselves?

If VMware do choose to make CloudFoundry.com reliant on functionality from the proprietary vFabric products, this would be a great shame for an excellent open source project.

I’m a big fan of the ideas behing Cloud Foundry from VMware, and spent a fair bit of time getting it up and running on AWS, so it’s really cool that there’s now a fully packaged Micro Cloud Foundry now available as a VM, as detailed by this blog post.

I spent some time last night and this morning trying it out, and basically it’s exactly what you’d expect – a full copy of Cloud Foundry, except you boot it up on your laptop (or on a vSphere host) in a VM, and away you go. You could probably even convert the VM image to run in Xen or VirtualBox, but don’t tell VMware, ok? 🙂

It does some very nice DNS tricks to let you handle all the management through the standard tools, and worked exactly as I expected it, so if you’re at all curious about Cloud Foundry, and perhaps a bit uncomfortable about using the public cloudfoundry.com hosted service for your experiments, then grab it now!