Comments on: Standards Disconnect at Cloud Connect

By: Tyranny of Choice in the Cloud | OpenLogic Blogs

Tyranny of Choice in the Cloud | OpenLogic Blogs — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 22:54:14 +0000

[...] least some cross-vendor groups focused on working together, even though some people think it's way too early for cloud standards. No [...]

By: William Vambenepe — The Tragedy of the Commons in Cloud standards

William Vambenepe — The Tragedy of the Commons in Cloud standards — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 06:04:32 +0000

[...] More generally, my main point here has nothing to do with Benjamin, Sam and their OSCON debate, other than the fact that reading about it prompted me to type this blog entry. It's simply that there is a perversion in the IT standards landscape that makes it impossible for premature standardization *not* to happen. It's something I've written before, e.g. in this post: [...]

By: William Vambenepe — Introducing the Oracle Cloud API

William Vambenepe — Introducing the Oracle Cloud API — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 06:14:14 +0000

[...] So why two documents? Because they serve different purposes. The Elemental Resource Model, submitted to DMTF, represents the technical foundation for the IaaS layer. It’s not all of IaaS, just its core. You can think of its scope as that of the base EC2 service (boot a VM from an image, attach a volume, connect to a network). It’s the part that appears in all the various IaaS APIs out there, and that looks very similar, in its model, across all of them. It’s the part that’s ripe for a simple standard, hopefully free of much of the drama of a more open-ended and speculative effort. A standard that can come out quickly and provide interoperability right out of the gate (for the simple use cases it supports), not after years of plugfests and profiles. This is the narrow scope I described in an earlier rant about Cloud standards: [...]

By: For Open Cloud Computing, Look Inside Your Data Center - A Collection of Latest Happening in Technology Field

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 05:50:44 +0000

[...] stack should be welcome: While open standards have long been a rallying cry of cloud commentators, reports from the recent Cloud Connect event suggest we can expect to wait a long while until meaningful software standards actually [...]

By: For Open Cloud Computing, Look Inside Your Data Center

For Open Cloud Computing, Look Inside Your Data Center — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 15:01:44 +0000

By: William (@vambenepe on Twitter)

William (@vambenepe on Twitter) — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 04:00:00 +0000

Stu, I agree but I also think it’s irrelevant. I just don’t think the incentives are there for customer involvement at the level needed. Which I why, as much as I’d love to see it happen, I don’t waste my time trying to make it happen. And I focus on the next best thing, which is to get independent experts and individual consultants involved, as a proxy for customers. I just think it has more of a chance of happening, and even then the current standards org are structured to make it next-to-impossible.

I applaud Bob for trying and I would be delighted to see him succeed. I just don’t think it will work.

At best, we’ll have a very specific and large customer, with a pretty specific approach and set of needs (e.g. the US gov). Better than nothing, but hardly a substitute for the involvement of a representative set of customers.

By: Stu

Stu — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 03:31:18 +0000

The biggest problem with the standards efforts (and I think Bob might agree) is a dearth of customer involvement and feedback. It’s not just a standards problem, it’s a problem with any cloud product vendor attempting to deal with enterprise customers, which is why most of them target developers or service providers. There is a tendency, particularly among enterprises, to “let the vendors sort it out”, and only adopt the technology once it is standardized, rather than going through the pain to think through what the issues are, what worked & didn’t work, etc.

Mostly (with notable exceptions), there is tire kicking and limited adoption of even the prior generation of data center automation tooling. One quote I loved was “We bought Opsware 6 years ago, and made no progress since then, since the Opsware rollout was coming just around the corner…. for 6 years”.

By: Damon Edwards

Damon Edwards — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 20:26:45 +0000

Excellent points William!

It’s always been my position that professional standards bodies (where there is a “pay wall” that you have to cross to have any meaningful input and that wall generates a pool of money that pays salaries and consultants fees) are an inherently bad thing. Pretty much anytime you allow a standards effort to be effectively controlled by people who have a paid interest (whether it’s a salary or consulting fee of some sort or pushing their own company’s agenda) you are starting from a fundamentally corrupt process and can only do damage control from there. It’s just the simple forces of human nature at work.

The only case where these professional organizations may play a useful roll is when the market has already sorted out a de facto standard. But formalizing, publishing, providing certification courses, etc. is a very very different type of activity then actually creating the standard!

In this age of massively networked communication at almost zero cost, why not let the users in the trenches sort these issues out?

Just my $0.02

-Damon
http://dev2ops.org

By: Bob Marcus

Bob Marcus — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 19:05:42 +0000

William:

Thanks for your write-up on the Panel.

Your perceptive statement that “if the goal, as I believe, was to surface the current issues, complexities, emotions and misunderstandings surrounding Cloud standards, then I’d say it was a success.” is exactly right. The only way to avoid many of the past mistakes in standardization is to engage many people (customers, providers, developers, formal/informal standards groups)in open discussions. Hopefully the Cloud Connect Standards Track will be the first of many follow-on events in the next few years.