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The Register’s Cade Metz reported this week that Yahoo “intends to open source its internal ‘cloud serving’ platform, described as something halfway between Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud and Google’s App Engine.”
Similar to Amazon’s EC2, Yahoo’s cloud provides on-demand access to computer resources. “But rather than offering raw virtual machines as Amazon’s EC2 does, it spins up ‘containers’ of server power that are pre-configured for things like load-balancing and security,” Metz reported.
Google App Engine does this too but it takes things much further. In doing so, Google hides a lot from the developer and also puts strict limitations on what the developer can do. For instance, Metz said, no system request can take longer than 30 seconds and it can’t return more than 10MB of data.
Yahoo “says its current plan is to open source the platform early in 2011. And eventually, it will open source all its back-end platform,” according to Metz.
