In my post "Interfaces for Private and Public Cloud Computing", I briefly described the main differences between public and private cloud computing from the perspective of their different application scope and interfaces. My position was that a private cloud interface should provide rich enough semantics, far beyond of that provided by public clouds (such as Amazon EC2 APIs), to ease the integration of the distributed virtual infrastructure in the data-center management stack, including user and administration support. Such interface should provide additional functionality for virtualization, networking, image and physical resource configuration, management, monitoring and accounting, not exposed by pubic cloud interfaces.

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