Almost a year ago in “Cloud Standards: not so fast…” I explained why standardisation efforts were premature. A lot has happened in the interim and it is now time to start intensively developing standards, ideally by deriving the “consensus” of existing implementations.
To get the ball rolling I’ve written a Cloud Standards Roadmap which can be seen as an authorative source for information spanning the various standardisation efforts (including identification of areas where effort is required).
Currently it looks like this:
Cloud Standards Roadmap
The cloud standards roadmap tracks the status of relevant standards efforts underway by established multi-vendor standards bodies.
| Layer | Description | Group | Project | Status | Due |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Client | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? |
| Software (SaaS) | Operating environment | W3C | HTML 5 | Draft | 2008 |
| Event-driven scripting language | ECMA | ECMAScript | Mature | 1997 | |
| Data-interchange format | IETF | JSON (RFC4627) | Mature | 2006 | |
| Platform (PaaS) | Management API | ? | ? | ? | ? |
| Infrastructure (IaaS) | Management API | OGF | Cloud Infrastructure API (CIA) | Formation | 2009 |
| Container format for virtual machines | DMTF | Open Virtualisation Format (OVF) | Complete | 2009 | |
| Descriptive language for resources | DMTF | CIM | Mature | 1999 | |
| Fabric | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? |
Other standards efforts
- Cloud Standards Group
- CCIF UCI – A “singular programmatic point of contact that can encompass the entire infrastructure stack as well as emerging cloud centric technologies all through a unified interface“
Vendor-owned standards
- Infrastructure
- Amazon EC2 API
- AppNexus API
- ElasticHosts API
- Eucalyptus (which uses the Amazon EC2 API)
- FlexiScale API
- Globus Numbus (which uses the Amazon EC2 API and WSRF)
- GoGrid API
- OpenNebula API
- SliceHost API
- Sun Cloud APIs
- Fabric
- F5 iControl (Networking)
Other resources