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Cloud Standards Roadmap

This content is 15 years old and may not reflect reality today nor the author’s current opinion. Please keep its age in mind as you read it.

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.

LayerDescriptionGroupProjectStatusDue
Client?????
Software (SaaS)Operating environmentW3CHTML 5Draft2008
Event-driven scripting languageECMAECMAScriptMature1997
Data-interchange formatIETFJSON (RFC4627)Mature2006
Platform (PaaS)Management API????
Infrastructure (IaaS)Management APIOGFCloud Infrastructure API (CIA)Formation2009
Container format for virtual machinesDMTFOpen Virtualisation Format (OVF)Complete2009
Descriptive language for resourcesDMTFCIMMature1999
Fabric?????

Other standards efforts

Vendor-owned standards

Other resources