WarpShare™

Tarzan/CloudFusion, comments and an update

We’ve been very busy over the past few months.

The WarpShare™ service is taking a bit more time to prepare than we’d originally thought. We have lots and lots of cool ideas, but we can only build them a day at a time. There isn’t much else I can talk about at this point in terms of technical progress, but I wanted to pass along the info that WarpShare is still on the horizon and will be coming as soon as it’s a bit more cooked.

Thirteen months ago, we open-sourced a piece of software that we’d been building called Tarzan™. In the time since then, Tarzan has become quite popular and at times difficult to keep up. We’re doing our best, however. Tarzan 2.0.4 will be going out very shortly. This is mostly a bug fix release, but we cheated and added a couple of minor new features in this release as well. Keep an eye on the release notes for more detail on the changes.

Also, Tarzan is beginning to branch out a bit. Up until this point, Tarzan has been built specifically for Amazon’s Web Services stack but that will soon be changing. As AWS has become more popular, new projects have been created that allow you to run services like EC2, S3, and SimpleDB on your own servers with an API that is identical to AWS. Tarzan intends to begin unofficially supporting these services soon (2.0.4 is a start). We’ve also been looking at the Rackspace/Mosso stack and are considering supporting their cloud as well. We will continue to evaluate this as we free up some resources to work on it.

To better reflect this beyond-Amazon direction, we will soon be re-branding Tarzan as CloudFusion™. If you’re on the mailing list, you may have seen a previous announcement for the name “CloudCore,” but we didn’t do enough homework up-front and discovered that there is already a trademark on that name. Our close-second choice was CloudFusion, so we’ll be moving forward with that. Tarzan 2.1 will be CloudFusion 2.1 and will come with a refreshed website, documentation, examples, and other goodies that we’re trying to get built.

Lastly, we’re now supporting a technology called OpenID for comments. What does that mean for you? It means that you can sign-in and comment on our blog with your existing account from Google/Gmail, Yahoo!, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Windows Live, Hotmail, Flickr, AOL, Blogger, WordPress.com, and others! We also intend to enable this technology to make registering for and logging into our upcoming WarpShare service as easy and painless as possible. Watch for that!

Look forward to more news soon!

Categories: Announcements, Tarzan, WarpShare and What we're doing

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