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As cloud computing matures -- meaning it is being used by increasingly larger companies for mission critical applications -- companies are shopping around for cloud providers with requirements that are more sophisticated than merely price and ease-of-use. One of these criteria is performance.

Performance has consistently been one of the main concerns enterprise buyers have had about cloud computing, as indicated from the chart of the responses to a survey conducted by IDC in Q3 of 2009.

There’s a long running debate about the true role of Virtual Machines (VMs) in cloud computing.  In talking with CTOs at the large vendors as well as the “Clouderati” over the last two years, there seems to be the desire to eliminate the VM from cloud computing.  A colleague of mine, Simeon Simeonov

Today Rackspace announced it is open sourcing its cloud platform and releasing it as a project called OpenStack together with others. The code should be available for download (if not now then in a few hours) on http://OpenStack.org. From the official press release:

This week Rackspace Cloud, in conjunction with the NASA Nebula project, open sourced some of their Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud software. This initiative, dubbed ‘OpenStack’, should have a dramatic impact on the current dynamics for building cloud computing infrastructure. Previously there have been two major camps: Amazon API and architecture compatible and VMware’s vCloud.