Cloud Deployment Toolkit (CDTK) is a project which was developed with Eclipse Community and which will support hundreds of thousands of customers soon. Bret Piatt from Rackspace Hosting -the company which initially proposed the project- answered to our questions.
How was Cloud Deployment Toolkit project born?
Last year we engaged with the Eclipse community to discuss how the cloud can help improve the workflow of its’ developers on a day to day basis. With the help of the Eclipse Foundation we went from an idea to a broadly supported project with Rackspace, enStratus, jclouds, Red Hat, Zend, and Cloudsmith each having contributing developers work on the project. The goal for the project is to provide developers the capability to deploy across any and all cloud infrastructures without having to change their workflow.
Now, in June 2010, what is the development level of CDTK?
The CDTK is not currently available as a beta release. It was presented at EclipseCon 2009 in a pre-alpha stage to solicit feedback from the developers in attendance before going into development. The project is now going through the early project stages where a more concrete timeline will be set and final scope will be locked down to build towards 1.0.
Was CDTK made for large corporations? How many users will it have to support?
CDTK will support provisioning cloud infrastructures that are used by hundreds of thousands of customers. We hope it will increase usage of the Eclipse IDE by cloud users and increase the usage of cloud infrastructure by developers already working out of the IDE on a daily basis.
In which sense being an OS project is a benefit for you? How do you contribute to open-source?
We believe that open-source development leads to trust between the communities that actively will use the software. We have actively invested in open-source projects, such as Cassandra and Drizzle, and plan to continue to invest in these efforts as we move to the future.
What do you think about TIO Libre definition here: http://www.tiolibre.com/guideline/tiolibre-Libre.Definition?
We’ve argued for some time that cloud providers should look at making it easy for their users to choose the features and service models they need without customers code being locked in to a specific cloud provider. We believe the industry needs to support an open cloud mindset that allows customers to run on any cloud without locking them in.
Interview by Elodie Pot - writer
Cloud Deployment Toolkit
Eclispe - http://www.eclipse.org/
Rackscape - http://www.rackspace.com
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