Talk about standards around cloud computing hints at progress, but IT industry history shows standards are slow to catch on sometimes despite big demand for technologies.
Cloud computing represents a game-changing opportunity for the IT industry, one that could alter how high-tech services are delivered for many organizations.
Beyond the hype: Cloud computing edification
The disruptive change still requires a standard approach by the players involved. IT management standards ranging from SNMP to CIM to WBEM often help vendors integrate their products with partners, but also help IT executives more freely adopt the technology they feel most suited for their environment without worry about proprietary systems not working well together. Yet in some cases, the work on standards far outweighs the adoption or the speed at which standards are put into place in end-user organizations.
With the extraordinary level of interest in cloud and the varied approaches to the technology that exist, it’s only natural that a discussion and efforts around developing standards emerged in recent years and work continues to be focused there. But can standards bodies work quickly enough to meet the growing demand for cloud computing from end-user organizations as well as vendors?
A little more than a year ago, the Distributed Management Task Force launched the DMTF Open Cloud Standards Incubator, which at the time was developed to focus on “improving interoperability between platforms through open cloud resource management,” according to the DMTF. Launched in May 2009 with supporters from vendors ranging from AMD to CA Technologies to Cisco, VMware and Microsoft, the incubator proposed to help enterprises interested in cloud adopt private and public cloud without worrying about interoperability between the platforms. VMware in September 2009 submitted its vCloud API Specification to the DMTF to “enable consistent mobility, provisioning, management and service assurance of applications running in internal and external clouds,” according to VMware.
In June 2010, the DMTF published the charter of the Cloud Management Working Group, (CMWG) spun out of the incubator.
“The CMWG will develop a set of prescriptive specifications that deliver architectural semantics as well as implementation details to achieve interoperable management of clouds between service requestors/developers and providers,” the charter reads. “The starting point of the CMWG work will be the deliverables from the Open Cloud Incubator as well as other initiatives and existing DMTF specifications including the Common Information Model (CIM), Open Virtualization Format (OVF), WBEM Protocols, member submissions and investigation of opportunities for collaboration with other industry standards bodies.”
It sounds promising, but standards often take too long to gain adoption with vendors, which typically wait to hear from customers wanting the standard before they equip their wares to be compliant. Some industry watchers think cloud demand will drive standards work among vendors.
“As Infrastructure as a Service [IaaS] offerings become more complex, the demands on the specification standard will become more complex. In addition to describing the service, specifications for control utilities such as starting and stopping the service must also become sufficiently standardized to allow a transparent switch from one provider to another without writing new control scripts or retraining personnel,” writes Marvin Waschke, senior advisor of product management in the office of the CTO at CA Technologies, in his blog this week. “Our industry continues to evolve in ways that enable customer to get more business value for every dollar they spend on technology and that forces vendors to continuously and even disruptively innovate.”
The DMTF’s incubator attracted some 35 or more companies to work on standards around managing resources in private and public clouds. Enterprise IT organizations looking to tap cloud services but worried about either manageability of the services or interoperability of those services with others existing elsewhere should lobby their vendors to take action and get the standards process moving forward. There has been much work done, but most likely there is much more to do.
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