CES may be generating the big buzz this week in Las Vegas, but AT&T is also there with its own AT&T Developer Summit. The telecom giant took the opportunity to highlight some big things coming to its cloud portfolio. Of note: AT&T took the wraps off its latest offering, AT&T Cloud Architect, billed as a “developer-centric” cloud, and announced it has thrown in its hat as a member of the OpenStack open cloud standard community.
The new AT&T Cloud Architect offering is designed to complement its existing cloud portfolio by appealing to the flexibility requirements of cloud developers. More specifically, AT&T says in its blog entry that Cloud Architect can be set up in public or private cloud instances, or simply built from the ground up with bare metal or dedicated server options. Cloud Architect will be generally available in the next few weeks, and AT&T is promising more developer-focused updates coming soon. Which is good, because without technical or pricing details it sounds vague at current.
AT&T also announced it’s the first U.S. telecommunications company to join OpenStack. AT&T apparently has been developing for OpenStack for more than a year, and has submitted a blueprint for a new transactional task management function. But AT&T has deployed OpenStack on dedicated infrastructure in its Dallas, San Diego and Secaucus, N.J., data centers — with plans to double that number in 2012. I’m waiting to hear back about which customer-facing services, if any, AT&T will deliver from its OpenStack infrastructure.
Overall, these plans are kind of vague. But AT&T is a heavyweight, and if it’s making open source moves, rest-assured TalkinCloud will keep close tabs, so stay tuned.
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