Red Hat Thursday unveiled Deltacloud, a new open source project aimed at enabling an ecosystem of developers, tools, scripts and applications that can interoperate across the public and private clouds complements of a common REST-based API that developers can write to once and manage anywhere.

Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens (pictured below) claims the breakthrough will be “epic.”

Currently, he said, each infrastructure-as-a-service cloud uses a unique API that developers and ISVs have to write to in order to consume the cloud service.

Red Hat imagines using Deltacloud to start an instance on an internal cloud, then with the same code start another on EC2 or Rackspace.

It says it will protect apps from “cloud API changes and incompatibilities.”

Stevens describes Deltacloud as “cloud broker,” with drivers that map the API to public clouds like EC2 and private virtualized clouds based on VMware and Red Hat Enterprise Linux with integrated KVM, Red Hat’s preferred, if immature, hypervisor.

He said the API can be test driven with the self-service web console that’s part of the Deltacloud effort.

Using the Deltacloud Portal, you should be able to view image status and stats across clouds, all in one place; migrate instances from one cloud to another; and manage images locally and provision them on any cloud.

Red Hat expects to support EC2, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV-M); VMWare ESX and RackSpace and promises backward compatibility across versions.

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