Engineer reveals HP public cloud on LinkedIn

A senior HP engineer has revealed a few titillating details about HP’s Amazon-like public cloud service on his LinkedIn profile. 

Scott McClellan, HP’s chief technologist and interim VP of engineering for its cloud business removed the details but only after The Register published a snapshot of them.  

McClellan had already “built from scratch” HP's distributed “object storage” service, according to his profile.

The description appeared to be similar to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3).   

McClellan’s profile also referred to HP’s “compute”, “networking” and a “block storage” service, similar to Amazon’s Elastic Block Storage at the centre of AWS’s recent outage.

The details flesh out the vague sketch that HP CEO Leo Apotheker offered analysts in March, according to ZDNet. 

McClellan had also referred to a cutting-edge provisioning automation feature that impressed at least one analyst. 

HP was taking a “declarative/model-based approach where users provide a specification and the system automates deployment and management,” according to McClellan.

Declarative provisioning appeared to be similar to Amazon’s recently announced AWS CloudFormation, according to GigaOm analyst, Derrick Harris. 

The feature was promoted as manner of streamlining the process of setting up load balancing, instances, storage volumes and database domains when launching or taking down applications.

“CloudFormation centers around two main abstractions: theTemplate in which the customer describes, in a simple text based format (JSON), what resources need to be created, what their dependencies are, what configuration parameters are needed,” Amazon’s chief technology officer Werner Vogels explained. 

Other features in HP’s pipeline, according to McClellan, were a Future HP cloud website including public content and authenticated user content, a fully functional GUI and command line interface (both Linux/Unix and Windows).

APIs mentioned were Java, Ruby and other open source languages. 

The absence of Microsoft's Azure, .NET, and the C# programming language has caused a small stir since HP, along with Dell and Fujitsu, had signed up as one of Microsoft's Azure platform appliance partners.

HP is set to announce details of its cloud plans in August at this year’s VMworld, according to the Register's sources.