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Sun's Open Cloud should be available starting the spring of 2009 with open source components such as MySQL and OpenSolaris to distinguish itself from proprietary platforms such as Amazon. Sun wants to make the technology underlying the cloud available to its partners so that they can build their own clouds but remain interoperable with Sun's. Part of their strategy is to set up an open Sun Cloud, with web developers, students and researchers as their target audience. Sun also targets newly founded ventures whereby they can hope to have a faster and cost-effective access to computing resources. Costs for the Sun Cloud have not yet been established.

Sun is putting the APIs through a public review process on a Kenai.com forum that it established as a community website for open source projects back in the fall of 2008. A change log, which requires registration, will list the actions based on the feedback from the APIs.

Sun's announcement follows their takeover of Q-Layer and Ian Murdocks's recent adoption of Sun's cloud strategist role. From Q-Layer Sun inherited the Virtual Data Center that cloud users can set up via a drag-and-drop facility for platforms and applications. Cloud storage should, according to Sun, be accessible through WebDav and the Open Cloud APIs be compatible with Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3).

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