The great thing about having a standard is that there are so many to choose from! Just weeks after the so-called Open Cloud Manifesto was snubbed by the likes of Salesforce.com and Amazon, along comes another effort, this time from the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF).
The DTMF's version is the Open Cloud Standards Incubator (OCSI) which has also set out to develop specifications that define how companies transfer applications and data between Cloud environments, public and private. A key component will be the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) which will describe an open, secure, portable and extensible format for packaging and distributing software to be run in virtual machines.
According to the OCSI charter document, the group will "develop a suite of DMTF informational specifications that deliver architectural semantics to unify the interoperable management of enterprise computing and Cloud Computing...the scope of this activity is focused on mainly Cloud resource-management aspects of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) with some work touching on platform-as-a-service (PaaS) including SLAs, QoS, utilisation, provisioning and accounting and billing.”
"Cloud Computing will have a major impact on IT management," said DMTF president Winston Bumpus. "With the DMTF's track record for leading the industry in the development of proven standards for management interoperability, along with its extensive network of Alliance Partners, this Open Cloud Standards Incubator provides an ideal setting for initiating work on specifications to enable interoperable Cloud management.”
But like the Open Cloud Manifesto there are some big names choosing to stand aside. In the loop are DMTF members such as AMD, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, Savvis, Sun Microsystems and Vmware. Absent are Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com and a number of other leading Cloud Computing providers.
"For many years, IBM has advocated common, open and consensus-based technology standards from reputable standards bodies, and cloud computing is no exception," said Erich Clementi, IBM's general manager of enterprise initiatives. "Open technical standards are integral to enabling the delivery of everything from healthcare to business services and consumer entertainment. IBM is committed to working with its industry peers to make it easier for clients to manage emerging Cloud environments that include technology from multiple vendors."
De jure v de facto
But while this effort has secured Microsoft (unlike the Open Cloud Manifesto), it's still lacking key figures. “It is an excellent line-up, but it is missing two very important infrastructure players, namely Google and Amazon,” noted Timothy Stammers of research house Ovum, who noted that the battle lines seem to be being drawn up again between de jure and de facto standards.
“Amazon's infrastructure cloud services are already three years old, and are a major market force,” he cited as an example. “One demonstration of their popularity is that IBM sells its applications as virtual severs ready-packaged to run in the Amazon cloud, and even allows customers to use existing IBM licences to do that. That packaging is done to Amazon's in-house AMI standard, which the DMTF acknowledges is more advanced than OVF. AMI has already been implemented in the open source Eucalyptus code, which allows customers to build their own Amazon-standard private clouds. If those customers want to, they can then easily move their virtual servers from there into Amazon's public Cloud.
“But currently Amazon does not look likely to join the DMTF incubator group, let alone donate AMI to its standards effort. In contrast, the DMTF says, players such as VMware and Sun are quite likely to contribute APIs that they have developed in other areas. Amazon's public position is that it is sceptical about the IT industry's ability to forge useful standards. So although it expects that Cloud standards will develop, and promises that it will adopt them wherever they will help customers, it will stand back from the DMTF, for now at least.
“This split between de jure and de facto standards is far from unusual in the IT industry. It is a reminder that although Cloud computing has the potential to revolutionise IT, it will not change the realities of competition. Whether the DMTF can overcome this problem to forge useful and widely adopted standards remains to be seen. It would be very much in customers' interests. Obviously what is needed is some form of rapprochement, with the DMTF recognising the reality of Amazon's standard, and both it and Amazon working to achieve at least some interoperability between OVF and AMI.”
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