Early next year, Yahoo! intends to open source its internal “cloud serving” platform, described as something halfway between Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and Google’s App Engine.

Known simply as “Cloud” within the company, the platform is that piece of Yahoo! infrastructure that serves up its online applications. In short, it provides the company’s internal developers with on-demand access to computing resources. But rather than offering raw virtual machines as Amazon EC2 does, it spins up “containers” of server power that are pre-configured for things like load-balancing and security. That way, developers needn’t handle the load-balancing on their own.

Google App Engine also handles this sort of nitty-gritty on behalf of the developer, but it goes much further. It hides even more of the underlying infrastructure, and it puts tight restrictions on the design of applications so they’ll conform with this infrastructure. It restricts what languages you use. It limits the libraries you can choose from. It even prevents you from making system requests that take more than 30 seconds or return more than 10MB of data.

With its “Cloud,” Yahoo! abstracts some of the infrastructure, but it also lets you develop with all those standard LAMP stack tools you’re used to. “We don’t bless the language,” Yahoo! chief architect Raymie Stata tells The Reg. “We bless the container.”

The company says its current plan is to open source the platform early in 2011. And eventually, it will open source all its back-end platforms.

Read more…

Credit to: TheRegister.co.uk


Related posts