Last week, OSRF went to CloudBeat. Hugo was in a panel discussion about the selection of Cloud provider infrastructure. Inspired by the success of the Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC), OSRF is continuing the development of CloudSim, which allows us to run Gazebo simulations, both on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) virtual cloud and the SoftLayer bare-metal cloud. In parallel, we’re also exploring OpenStack private cloud support, and are looking forward to the advent of GPU virtualization technology and the upcoming cloud gaming industry.

Hugo got a chance to meet with Duke Scarda, CTO of Softlayer, our cloud partner for the VRC, and Mike Miller of Cloudant. Mike was insightful in comparing AWS to the iPhone and OpenStack to Android of a few years ago: the iPhone was certainly the visionary leader and first to market. We should see interesting developments in the coming months as the industry seems to be rallying around OpenStack and SDN (Software Defined Networking)… prompting Amazon and VMWare to reinvent themselves.

Let us know what you’d like the ROS cloud to be like.