IBM Altocumulus: A Cross-Cloud Middleware and Platform

Cloud computing has become the new face of computing and promises to offer virtually unlimited, cheap, readily available, "Utility type" computing resources. Many vendors have entered this market with different offerings ranging from infrastructure-as-a-service such as Amazon, to fully functional platform services such as Google App Engine. However, as a result of this heterogeneity, deploying applications to a cloud and managing them needs to be done using vendor specific methods. This "Lock in" is seen as a major hurdle in adopting cloud technologies to the enterprise. IBM Altocumulus, the cloud middleware platform from IBM Almaden Services Research, aims to solve this very issue of managing applications across multiple clouds.