Amazon is getting tantalizingly closer to providing a native platform that enables extending your private cloud to AWS. This service allows for the importing and exporting of VMDK (VMWare), Citrix, XEN VHD and Hyper-V VHD images of Windows 2003 R2 and 2008 R1/R2 servers. I can easily see a 3rd party provider creating software that provides software synchronization of your private VM’s into you Amazon storage and offing a cloud manager to manage the movement of workloads.
Better still, as Amazon gains experience in this service they could create a hybrid cloud manager that makes this process seamless. I think this is an opportunity for the OpenStacks and CloudStacks of the world to leverage the service to create the automation within the OpenStack platform. You could then have the option of choosing to extend your private cloud to OpenStack native providers such as Rackspace or AWS. Ideally, I’d like to see Amazon and Rackspace compete on the attributes of their infrastructure and not on compatibility of their stack with the enterprise hypervisor of the day.
