Comments on: Hey You, Standarize My Cloud

By: Why the Cloud Need Standards | BusinessTechFeed

Why the Cloud Need Standards | BusinessTechFeed — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 21:06:31 +0000

[...] and interoperability” open space, alongside Matthias Kohl of Zimory. The session started off on potential standards for system images. While that sort of portability is a valid concern, there are much bigger concerns around standards [...]

By: James Governor’s Monkchips » CloudCamp London 2: On Standards. Special Guest Post.

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:06:58 +0000

[...] 45 minutes, touching on a broad range of issues. Although the discussion kicked off focusing on potential standards for system images, with a view to enabling portability, it was very clear that portability requires significantly [...]

By: tecosystems » Break for the Clouds: Top 5 Reasons The Cloud Benefits from a Recession

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 20:43:32 +0000

[...] piece this week on lockin echoes the concerns that I have had that have led to both talk (1, 2) and action (ping me for details) on the question of [...]

By: fred smith

fred smith — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 02:41:26 +0000

I can see Amazon, Google, Yahoo,Sun, IBM, etc. following some published world body standard concerning cloud computing, but you forget about another large software player who has never, nor will they ever, follow any standards, W3C or otherwise.

Consider: (1) They will not adhere to W3C standards for HTML (2) They will not follow ECMA standards concerning JavaScript, (3) They will not follow ANSI C/C++ standards, (4) They will not follows SQL standards, (4) They will not follow XML standards, (4) They will not follow ODF standards, get their own proprietary ODF standards pushed through and then cannot even implement their own standards.

This same company will not adhere, will not publish, and will only cooperate when huge amounts of cash are provided to them, or else have complete and total ownership and control over everything they touch. Everything they do is proprietary, they do not like playing with anyone on any level. WH are they? Look to Redmond, WA. You should find a clue as t their identity.

As long s MS is a major player, standards are not possible across all domains.

By: Boycott Novell » More ODF, More FOSS, a Little Less Microsoft

Boycott Novell » More ODF, More FOSS, a Little Less Microsoft — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 10:47:07 +0000

[...] to ECMA OOXML. It never did and it continues to deviate further away. Adobe is pretty much the same when it comes to Flash, so it would be risky to hold our breath based on this new gem from O’Grady. Perhaps the [...]

By: PeterNic

PeterNic — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:42:22 +0000

Stephen and John,

Thanks for the great articles; this is a fun and important discussion. Considering that standards take a long time to develop and make meaningful, the baby steps are needed soon.

On the management and automation: yes, these seem to be the operative words. A word of caution, though: *what* entities do we manage and automate and at what level?

Imagine that, long time ago, in the early days of pre-OS 360, we decided we wanted to automate storage by managing tables of starting blocks for the various data pieces (rather than creating a file system). No matter how good automation and management system for those we come up with, the real answer is abstraction — the creation of the file system — that could then be managed and automated.

So, the big question in cloud standards — and in cloud delivery, I think — is “what is the level of abstraction” we will work at?

Answers abound, different from each vendor:
- VM’s on demand (admittedly, with some quirks)
- whole real physical servers (a small but interesting new company I met at CloudCamp last week — NewServers out of Florida gives you real servers by the hour with a REST interface! — starting at $0.11/hr)
- ready stacks (Mosso, Google and others)
- applications and grids (yours truly at 3Tera)

A good standard (or a set of standards) will make this work well together. A bad standard will be another ATM spec built by committee and never really fully implemented.

The challenge is ahead of us.

Regards,
– Peter

By: botchagalupe

botchagalupe — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:03:03 +0000

Bert’s quote was wrong (see comments from Rightscale and Easltra) on this post…

Bridging the Clouds

Also, IMO, this all ties back to IT Management infrastructure. In the end there will be a lot of Amazon like players and trying to get AMI as a standard could be a waste of time. If you readers want some of my thoughts on standards here goes …

Do we need a cloud standard or just one good old IT management standard?

By: William Vambenepe

William Vambenepe — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 06:01:02 +0000

Yeah, yeah, baby steps I know. Somehow I always tend to underestimate the time it takes to complete the tasks I assign to other people…
In addition to the post you point there, there is a more recent one on my blog (ignited by Bert’s Forbes interview) that may be of interest to your readers. The post itself isn’t all that insightful, but the many comments from Bert, Peter, Stu, John, Steve, etc are really good.

By: Peter Williams

Peter Williams — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:45:28 +0000

As someone who spends almost all my time on a pure cloud based application I can say that I would love to have some inter-cloud portability. I think you are right about the smaller players being the sector from which this will come. And that might work, a few dozen small, but standardized, players might well be able to compete with AWS. If for no other reason than they can make a compelling claim they are *really* unlikely to all go down at the same time.