HP Takes Developer Slant With Cloud Offering

Software developers were among the first users of cloud environments. Amazon, Microsoft, and Joyent all cater to developers with their public cloud services, and Hewlett-Packard also will emphasize developer tools in its upcoming cloud offering.

HP says it will run its cloud services, due to move out of beta testing later this spring, out of dozens of small data centers worldwide. It plans to have bindings--hardware interfaces--for Java, .NET, PHP, and Ruby.

Management tools for the new cloud environment will be simple, intuitive, and focused on supporting rapid development and providing sophisticated reporting and access control, HP says. As such, HP is clearly aiming to win over developers, with hopes that the software and services they create will remain in the HP cloud as they move into production.

Other providers are making it easier for developers to use their cloud services. Microsoft, with Windows Azure, isn't restricting developers to using .NET, even though Azure is a Windows Server-based environment. Microsoft provides language-specific SDKs for .NET, Java, PHP, and Node.js. A general Windows Azure SDK provides basic support for any language, including C++ and Python.

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