Red Hat pushes open cloud API

Linux distribution vendor Red Hat has submitted its Apache Deltacloud API to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) in attempts to establish it as an industry standard.

The move was announced in a webcast press briefing this week, when Red Hat outlined its Cloud Foundations Portfolio that had first been introduced at the Red Hat Summit in June.

Red Hat's cloud computing product manager Bryan Che said the vendor this year relinquished control of Deltacloud to Apache, so it would be under the open source governance of a third party.

He announced that the API had been submitted to the DMTF as part of Red Hat's participation in the DMTF cloud management work group.

"Since releasing the Deltacloud API open source, we've seen quite a lot of traction in the industry around the emerging standard," Che said.

Red Hat claimed that Deltacloud was one of the only open cloud APIs in development, bringing with it open source principles such as user-driven innovation.

Deltacloud was a RESTful web service API that allowed applications to be moved between supported cloud or virtualised resources, including Amazon's EC2 and Red Hat's RHEV-M.

DMTF president Winston Bumpus stated that the organisation was "pleased to receive Red Hat's submission of the Delatacloud API specification and look forward to their ongoing collaboration in our work to facilitate interoperable cloud management".

Deltacloud was first announced by Red Hat in September 2009.

At the time, the company's CTO and engineering VP Brian Stevens wrote: "While it is a young project, the potential impact on users, developers, and IT to consume cloud services via a common set of tools is epic."