Cloudscaling, the leading provider of open cloud infrastructure solutions for cloud-ready applications has recently launched a new compute API set for OpenStack that is compatible with Google Compute Engine (GCE), Google’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) compute service. This makes the OpenStack the first IaaS software solution to support the GCE APIs. The update was given by the Cloudscaling on their official blog.

The GCE API is quite similar to the two existing compute APIs – EC2 and Nova, with the edge that it is implemented as first-class citizens of OpenStack Compute and provide a RESTful API that is highly compatible with Google Compute Engine.

“I’ve personally spent time on Google Compute Engine (GCE) now and I can honestly say that it’s a game changer. While it might be flying under the radar now, I expect this to change in the future. GCE is really the first major public cloud I have seen, other than AWS, that is designed as a true elastic, scale-out Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) system. The new Rackspace OpenStack-based cloud is close, but GCE is really ahead in a number of key areas, including their on-demand block storage service (equivalent to AWS Elastic Block Storage). This isn’t readily apparent unless you have used GCE, because they don’t make much noise,” said Rand Bias, Co-Founder and CTO of Cloudscaling.

As we know that OpenStack has become the new de facto standard cloud infrastructure framework, lots of developments have been seen lately in this domain. The most recent one is the free distribution of OpenStack framework by Cisco. The networking company is also rolling out support for Quantum, the virtual networking component introduced with the most recent Folsom community distro. Prior to that, Rackspace Hosting initiated a new effort to help the cloud community grab some attractive certifications, in the form of OpenStack Fundamentals. This offering is based on teaching materials that hosting company developed internally for a course called OpenStack Fundamentals, which has been available for the past year.