My home standardization body OGF published the first list of requirements for a Open Cloud Computing Interface. One of the more interesting parts of this spec is the feature matrix for existing cloud APIs to be considered:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
• ElasticHosts
• Flexiscale
• GoGrid
• Sun Cloud API
• Rackspace Cloud Servers
• WMware vSphere

Their analysis shows some interesting facts:

• Amazon does not support persistent computer resources, most others do.
• Only Amazon has support for ephermal (real local) storage resources, which are huge and performant, but not resilient to hardware faults. Everybody supports virtual persistent storage.
• Static IPs and firewall features are about to become “cloud mainstream.”