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
Sam Johnston 