Deltacloud becomes an Apache Top Level Project

The Apache Deltacloud project, which has been incubating at Apache since it was contributed to Apache in May 2010 by Red Hat, has officially become an Apache Top Level Project. Deltacloud is a definition for a REST API for interacting with cloud service providers. It also includes implementations of an API server for popular cloud services such as Amazon, Eucalyptus, GoGrid, Microsoft, OpenStack and Rackspace. There are also client libraries for Ruby, C and C++.

Deltacloud's was actually voted on and graduated to a top-level project back in October 2011; why the announcement of its top-level project status has been made today is unclear, but some projects do take time migrating infrastructure to the top level.

Deltacloud is the second cloud management API project to graduate to the Apache Software Foundation's top-level status. In May 2011, the Apache Libcloud project also became a top-level project with its Python-based implementation of a common vendor-independent API for cloud services. It uses any one of its multiple backends to translate its API to that of a target service.

Both Deltacloud and libcloud are one of a number of attempts to create a standardised API for interacting with IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) clouds; other offerings include a service bus from the Open Source Business Foundation, an IEEE guide and standard for cloud portability, and an OASIS initiative called TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications). Deltacloud itself was offered to the DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) as a potential standard in 2010.

Deltacloud is available to download and install and is distributed under the Apache Licence 2.0.

(djwm)