Clashing over cloud standards

There's a war brewing in the virtual skies. And it's about standards.

Last month there were numerous exchanges about the importance and value of creating standards for cloud computing providers. One of the most interesting was the Open Cloud Manifesto.  I profiled its primary driver, Rueven Cohen, back in February.

The Manifesto argues that users, government and cloud providers need to work together on a manageable set of standards to assure that applications and data can be portable across multiple cloud operations. That is, if you run your software on the Amazon EC2 site one week, you ought to be able to redeploy it in a competing data center in the cloud the next week.

Robert Ames is all for an open, standards-base cloud. He's the deputy chief technology officer for IBM's Federal division. In fact, he says the lack of standards is the number two reason behind security concerns that keeps Uncle Sam from more broadly embracing software as a service and cloud computing.

"The government has a fear of lock-in" to a provider's cloud technology, he says.

So Ames applauds the work being done by the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum to bring standards to the technology. But he acknowledges there's much to be done.

For example, virtualization is the sine qua non for cloud operations. However, Ames observes that there is no standard way to create a virtual machine. VMware does it one way, Hyper-V another and so on. There's the Open Virtual Machine Format, but it's methodology has not been baked into an official standard.

Then there's the evolving notion of just what comprises a cloud technology stack. Also, are there going to be new standards for security? And even if standards emerge, will it mean that an application that runs well in one virtualized cloud be guaranteed to run as well in another cloud?

Cloud interoperability and standards are a nice idea. Nay, they're a great idea. But they aren't going to fly for a while, and for good reason.

When a new approach to technology takes off like cloud computing is today, the last thing you want to do is hamper its development by instantly weighing it down with new standards. One of the wisest ideas in the Open Cloud Manifesto is the argument to use, wherever feasible, existing standards. But it does not follow that where existing standards do not exist, new ones need to be developed, at least not immediately.

Cloud computing should develop its own standards in an organic way and not have them imposed from above. For example, my recollection is that the Standard Generalized Markup Language was in existence long before the advent of the Worldwide Web and was there for the taking as the standard model to build Web pages. However, when it came time to actually build those pages SGML proved too clunky, so HTML, a then non-standard markup language, was developed. If SGML had been force-fed upon Web developers we might not have gone too far beyond static ad-ware pages of the mid-1990s.

Standards have their place, though generally not until after the market knows exactly what standards are needed.