Red Hat Shows What Real Cloud Looks Like

By Dana Blankenhorn: Citrix Systems (CTXS) has released Cloudstack, an open source cloud infrastructure system acquired with Cloud.com, to the Apache Foundation.

By Dana Blankenhorn: The cloud computing market is caught between its head and its heart. The head is closed. The head buys VMWare's (VMW) vSphere hypervisor, which is proprietary. The head buys Amazon (AMZN) Web Services' (AWS) public cloud, also proprietary (but with an open API). The heart, however, is open.

By Dana Blankenhorn: Which has more value in the cloud, open source code or an open API?

By Dana Blankenhorn: Salesforce.com (CRM) CEO Marc Benioff (right) made headlines this week railing against VMWare (VMW) and Oracle (ORCL) for selling what he termed a "

By Dana Blankenhorn: This has been a hard few months for OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure first pioneered at NASA and later offered, as an open source project, through Rackspace (RAX) and, now, the OpenStack Foundation.This spells trouble for IBM.

By Dana Blankenhorn: If Infrastructure as a Service was the cloud buzzword of 2010, and Platform as a Service was the cloud buzzword of 2011, cloud operating system will be the big cloud buzzword of 2012.

By Dana Blankenhorn: What makes Amazon's (AMZN) AWS services, based on its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) framework, so powerful in the market is its Application Program Interface (API).Enterprises know the API, they write to it, it's controlled by Amazon, and this creates a "moat" around its AWS market share. It's hard to get out of Amazon once you get into it.