Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Standards Are The Key

The spoils will go to the first vendor supporting IaaS standards

Dec. 16, 2008 03:40 AM

Scott Mattoon's Blog

IaaS standards will enable a market place in which workloads can be moved from cloud to cloud according to price, capacity, and feature criteria. A few companies are jockeying for the pole position in the race to provide the arbitrage for this meta cloud.

Ian Kallen over at Technorati wrote a nice post about the cloud computing ontology and the subtleties of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). I'm glad to know he's still working on the hard problems there at the blogsphere search engine after their recent cost cutting measures.

As he has said to me previously, he writes, "What I foresee is that the first vendor to embrace and commoditize a standard interface for infrastructure management changes the game." I think he's right, particularly in his prediction that these standards will enable a market place in which workloads can be moved from cloud to cloud according to price, capacity, and feature criteria.

A few companies are jockeying for the pole position in the race to provide the arbitrage for this meta cloud that Ian envisions. RightScale is perhaps in the best spot for that right now. But who's going to set the standards for interfacing with clouds?

It's still pretty early in the game, but there's no question that Amazon has a good leg up with the AWS APIs, which are further buttressed by Eucalyptus's emulation of those interfaces in their open source Xen based IaaS stack.

Meanwhile, Reuven Cohen over at Enomaly is fostering a Unified Cloud Interface (UCI) standard to be submitted to the IETF next year. Conspicuously, it appears that Amazon is involved in neither the Eucalyptus nor UCI standards efforts.

Meanwhile, RightScale is working closely with Rich Wolski's Eucalyptus team, and both of these standard bearers are advising on Sun's Network.com model. It will be interesting to witness the evolution of agreed upon standard interfaces in the presence of the defacto standard that is AWS. Until there's a cleaner and/or cheaper way to develop on OpenSolaris in the cloud, I'll continue to write to the AWS interfaces to launch and extend instances of OpenSolaris on EC2.

Published Dec. 16, 2008— Reads 3,635
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About Scott Mattoon
Scott Mattoon is Sun's Chief Architect of the U.S Western Region. He serves on the Board of Directors of Architecture for Humanity, sponsor of the Open Architecture Network. He is an active advocate for open source and sustainable business. Mattoon seeks to apply the principles of transparency, collaboration and sharing in his work as Chief Architect for Sun Microsystems' Western U.S. Market. He is technical liaison for Sun to the TED community, and serves as lead systems architect for Sun's support of TED prize winners Cameron Sinclair, Neil Turok and Bill Clinton for their work in Africa. A student of sustainability, he tries to stitch ecological impact awareness, energy analysis, and long term thinking into everything he does. A glimpse of his sensibilities relating to open source and sustainable business are revealed on his downstream blog.

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