Is there a Standard for Cloud adoption?
In my earlier blog Google App Engine – Where to start? I wrote on one of the Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider on how enterprises can use?
For the Cloud to be embraced by enterprises there should be less fear on vendor lock-in by using proprietary platforms.
The primary need to over come that fear is aligning to industry wide standards. Cloud Standards which are important and relevant from a Cloud platform adoption perspective are Portability, Integration and Interoperability.
Let us look what are the industry initiatives happening on these cloud standards.
There are number of working groups, standard bodies are trying to address this. However, the most prominent one are:
Unified Cloud Interface uses semantic web concepts and acts like a cloud broker (using Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol -XMPP) and addresses both Platform as a Service (PaaS) interface and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) interface.
Open Cloud Manifesto tries to address standards around security, integration, portability, interoperability, governance etc.
Integration (Cloud and the enterprise), Interoperability (between clouds) can mature faster and However, portability can remain as a wish for longer time. For e.g. today’s major PaaS platforms Google App Engine, MS Azure, Salesforce force.com all will need a complete rewrite to move from one Cloud service provider to another.
Overall Cloud standards are an effort in the positive direction for the enterprises to adopt the cloud.
