The Sun Cloud will be RESTful

"I am 100% convinced that if there were a general-purpose platform for running behind the firewall to automate scaling and deployment and take IT out of many loops, there are a whole lot of enterprises who’d love that kind of elasticity in their infrastructure.

Machine virtualization is a big deal, obviously. Lightweight lockin-free data-center virtualization might be bigger, I think."

He's right! At Loopt there are many, many things we can't use conventional, public, cloud offerings for because of privacy and/or security concerns. I would jump immediately at the opportunity to install 3-5 racks of Sun hardware and/or software, and get my own mini-cloud to expose to Loopt developers.

Right now the closest I can get is VMWare, but even it is still much to close to the metal. Something like this could truly revolutionize how private data centers are managed.

Imagine: * Need a QA environment for a while? Provision it. Drop it when done. * Need to shift the allocation of processing resources between various internal tasks and services as load and usage varies? Script it. Done.

I'm sure there are tons of use cases I'm missing. Those are just my top two.

Simply because we wanted a bits-on-the-wire interface. APIs, in the general case, suck; and are really hard to make portable. Bits-on-the-wire are ultimately flexible and interoperable. If you’re going to do bits-on-the-wire, Why not use HTTP? And if you’re going to use HTTP, use it right. That’s all.

There's no official announcement online from Sun, other than a bits written about CommunityOne. Most of the information has come from this post by Tim Bray where he writes about his experience on the project. Everything I've read is about the API, but where's the service? They're already 3 years behind Amazon so there's no rush. Wait a few months and announce it all at once.