Towards Open Clouds with Cloud Interoperability

Cloud interoperability is specifically about one cloud solution being able to work with other platforms and other applications, not just other clouds. Much has been talked about cloud computing over the past 2 years and now with a plethora of platform vendors and multiple cloud manifestations like public, private and hybrid models, the key to larger adoption lies in interoperability standards. While the industry is still in the early stages of collaborating on cloud interoperability issues, there has already been a considerable progress. But, what does cloud interoperability mean, and how will it benefit the enterprises?

Experts say that what is typically discussed under the fabric of cloud interoperability right now is still in its early days and more definite standards will help enterprises to leverage the true power of the cloud. Wayne Citrin, an interoperability expert and CTO, JNBridge (a company based out of the US) says, Cloud interoperability is one where applications and services can be developed in any technology and deployed to any cloud, where cloud services can be accessed by any other cloud service or from any client on the ground in any platform, anywhere. And until that exists, there will be severe limits on user adoption of cloud computing. While we have not arrived at seamless cloud interoperability, but many experts believe that will ultimately happen sooner or later.

The Road to Interoperability

Vendor lock-in was something that is not new to technology. Its seen as a necessary evil and many times we hear about anti-trust cases filed against leading technology companies on unfair monopolistic trade practices. But in the cloud computing space, efforts are on to avoid vendor lock-in so that the real power of the cloud can be harnessed. Enterprises today are looking at cloud services as a way to consolidate IT infrastructure, scale their IT systems for the future, and enable innovative services and activities that were not possible before. To help organizations realize the benefits of cloud services, technology vendors are investing in identifying and solving the challenges presented by operating in mixed IT environments and collaborating to ensure that their products work well together.

Cloud is a disruptive technology and market forces will determine its evolution and its further adoption. If we look at the last couple of years, leading cloud vendors have taken a pre-emptive approach on cloud interoperability even while cloud computing itself is evolving. They realized that given the heterogenous enterprise IT assets, cloud cannot work if they practice proprietary methods. Experts say that over the last year definite progress has been made towards new standards for higher cloud interoperability and lesser vendor lock-in.

Initiatives like the Cloud Security Alliance are increasingly focusing on the inherent issues in larger cloud adoption and the challenges. Towards that end, the key standard that has emerged on cloud interoperability is the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) advocated by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). DMTF is a consortium through which more than 200 technology vendors and customers develop new standards for systems management. AMD, Cisco, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware are among a handful of IT vendors that lead the Open Cloud Standards Incubator, creating technical specifications and conducting research to expedite adoption of new cloud interoperability standards. The Open Virtualization Format (OVF) specification describes an open, secure, portable, efficient and extensible format for the packaging and distribution of softwares to be run in virtual machines.

Vendor Views

Microsoft has taken some definite steps on cloud interoperability. Sources say that the launch of Open Data Center Alliancea consortium of leading global IT managers with over $50 bn in collective IT spendingsin October 2010 is a big step forward. Companies like Microsoft believe that customers want the flexibility to run applications either locally or in the cloud, or on a combination of the two. Microsoft is collaborating with others in the industry and working to ensure that the promise of cloud interoperability becomes a reality. Sources at Microsoft say that one of the main attractions of the cloud is the degree of flexibility and control it gives customers and its goal is to preserve that flexibility through an open approach to cloud interoperability. Microsoft intends to create a software thats more open from the ground up, building products that support the existing standards, helping customers use its cloud services together with open source technologies such as PHP and Java, and ensuring that its existing products work with the cloud.

Says Pallavi Kathuria, director, server business, Microsoft India, Interoperability is critical towards delivering the greatest promise of the cloudchoice for end users to run their applications locally, on the cloud or on a combination of both. As Microsoft continues to lead the industry in transition to the cloud, we are committed to do so in an open way.

Companies like Amazon Web Services meanwhile say that ideas on openness and standards have been talked about for years in web services and standards will continue to evolve in the cloud computing space based on a better understanding of what is needed and what will best serve customers. Says Dr Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon Web Services, We have heard from customers who are really committed to using the cloud, is that the best way to illustrate openness and customer flexibility is by what you actually provide and deliver for them. Since 2006, we have made AWS available via multiple platforms, multiple programming languages and multiple operating systems because thats what customers have told us matters the most to them. We will continue to pursue an approach of providing customers with maximum flexibility as the standard discussion unfolds.

The cloud enables a customer to compose and deploy an application or even an end-to-end enterprise solution, assembled from the services of multiple providers, with far less effort than required to handle the same degree of heterogeneity in a conventional data center. Customers are using the distinctive competence of many service providers to assemble composite solutions. Reflecting on this, Peter Coffee, head, platform research, salesforce.com says, In this market, a service that fails to make vigorous efforts at interoperability is invisible and irrelevant. And, the world of the cloud has demanded that providers accept and enable standards of interaction which is quite a different role for standards as compared to the desire for simple substitutability that drove previous IT markets.

Peter Coffee further says that non-proprietary standards of interoperability, such as web services protocols already define the cloud marketplace. For instance, more than half the workload borne by salesforce.com systems supports other services invoking salesforce.com APIs, rather than executing salesforce.coms own cloud applications. Customers will therefore do well to think on a higher level than mere substitution. Any competitive IT platform should give application developers and customers the freedom to put some things where their productivity and capability will be greatest, while putting other things where substitutability is maximized. The proper role of standards is to provide and preserve a choice among varied paths.

From salesforce.com perspective, in the recent months, the evolution of its Force.com platform has emphasized incorporation of new facilities for customers and developers to employ existing skills, and use existing inventories of proven code and business logic in ways that are complemented rather than replaced by Force.coms multi-tenant architecture. These include initiatives such as the salesforce.com and VMware partnership to deliver Java support with VMforce; the salesforce.com acquisition of Heroku to enable Force.com support for Ruby on Rails; and the offering of the companys trusted database platform under the database.com brand, giving open and robust database support to developers whose previous work may have been based on other emerging and legacy platforms.

Meanwhile players like VMware are also playing a key role in advancing cloud interoperability and making the cloud work for diverse customer scenarios. Says Seema Ambastha, director, technology, VMware India, We are playing a critical as well as an enabling role in the cloud interoperability initiatives. The significant contribution we have done relates to the vCloud APIan interface for providing and consuming virtual resources in the cloud. It enables deploying and managing virtualized workloads in private, public and hybrid clouds.

Up Ahead

As we look forward, the ongoing year will see a further evolution of interoperability standards. And today more than security, the CIO is more closely looking at creating a flexible cloud architecture that is agile and can talk with diverse IT assets within the enterprise and multiple cloud vendors as well. For instance, Microsoft is part of an initiative called Simple Cloudan effort it co-founded with Zend Technologies, IBM, and Rackspace and is designed to help developers write basic cloud applications that work on all of the major cloud platforms. Instances like these are good for the overall cloud adoption as it will open up cloud computing to a whole lot of possibilities which CIOs can leverage for optimizing their IT investments.

The industry is still in the early stages of collaborating on cloud interoperability issues while significant progress has already been made. This progress has had a significant positive impact on the way in which we work and live today. Experts say that cloud interoperability requires a broad perspective and a creative, collaborative problem-solving approach. Leading vendors must continue the current momentum in supporting the open dialog among different stakeholders in the industry and community to define cloud principles and incorporate all points of view to ensure that in this time of changes, there is a world of choice.

Shrikanth G
shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in