Update: Please read this update. The information underlying this post was based on early, somewhat garbled, reports.

A brief digression from the unpleasantness of reliability.

This morning, Sun announced their re-entry into the cloud computing market. After withdrawing Network.com from the marketplace a few months ago, we were all wondering what Sun’s approach would be. No hardware vendor can afford to ignore the cloud computing trend… it’s going to change how customers view their own data centers and hardware purchases.

One thing that really caught my interest was the description of Sun’s cloud offering. It sounded really, really similar to AWS. Then I heard the E-word and it made perfect sense. Sun announced that they will use EUCALYPTUS as the control interface to their solution. EUCALYPTUS is an open-source implementation of the AWS APIs.

Last week at QCon London, we heard Simon Wardley give a brilliant talk, in which he described Canonical’s plan to create a de facto open standard for cloud computing by seeding the market with open source implementations. Canonical’s plan? Ubuntu and private clouds running EUCALYPTUS.

It looks like Amazon may be setting the standard for cloud computing, in the same way that Intel set the standard for desktop and server computing, by defining the programming interface.

I don’t worry about this, for two reasons. One, it forestalls any premature efforts to force a de jure standard. This space is still young enough that an early standard can’t help but be a drag on exploration of different business and technical models. Two, Amazon has done an excellent job as a technical leader. If their APIs “win” and become de facto standards, well, we could do a lot worse.