Being open with the APIs will help partners to build on top of Sun's services more quickly, according to Chander Kant, CEO of Zmanda, which offers a service for backing up databases to Amazon S3, and which will offer a similar service for the Sun Storage Cloud. He noted Sun's use of WebDAV, an HTTP extension that lets developers collaborate and access files over a network.
"Because WebDAV is open, there are more tools and utilities already built that we could use," Kant said. "The pace of innovation is faster because we can stand on the shoulders of others instead of trying to do everything from scratch."
Sun's brand may help his company attract more enterprise customers, he said. "While Amazon S3 is a tried and tested service and has proved popular with the Web crowd, we think when we go and sell to enterprises, Sun's offering -- particularly if they are already using Sun servers or Sun storage - will be a natural for them," Kant said.
Sun still has much work to do, he noted, such as building a robust payments system. "Amazon has a very good infrastructure for monthly billing and holding onto your credit card data and so on. ... That's something Sun is going to have to learn," he said.
Sun will continue to work with Amazon even while it competes with it, Soto said. OpenSolaris OS will continue to be an option on EC2, and Sun will support Amazon's object-store API, so that developers can take an application developed on S3 and move it to the Sun Storage Cloud, Soto said.
Sun is expected to launch other cloud services in the future, including potentially hosted versions of its MySQL database and other infrastructure products.
"Sun expects to play many roles in cloud computing, as a direct provider of cloud services, as a partner to service providers putting cloud computing into place, and as a supplier to enterprises launching internal 'private' clouds inside the firewall," said IDC analyst Jean Bozman.
Its cloud infrastructure will include x86 and Sparc hardware hosted at Switch Communications' SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas, Soto said. Sun is using the software it acquired in January from Q-Layer for provisioning the servers, storage and other resources.
The cloud services will be available to developers worldwide, so long as their are no legal restrictions preventing them from using them, Soto said. Some countries prohibit their citizens' personal data being stored outside of the country, for example.
"Amazon did a good job of bringing their services to market, but this is a market that is still in its very early stages in our view," Soto said.
