Nice blog as always.

I agree too. Defining a taxonomy will be difficult in these types of organizations because they are comprised of vendors who stand to make or lose money based-on how they their products might be classified. But I have faith in the market. The market tends to cut to the chase…ignore things that aren’t relevant and latch onto things that have value. Thus, this taxonomy, if it does go forward, had better be right and done quickly otherwise the market will move on. Otherwise it stands a chance of being ignored (like some of the standards created by these organizations). Also, this taxonomy had better use existing terms…Pandora’s box has been opened and people are assigning names and definitions already. A taxonomy isn’t going to magically rename something just because a vendor wants to be classified in a certain way.

Cloud computing in some ways reminds me of how the term “Green Computing” started. At first, it seemed pretty clear that “Green Computing” was about energy efficiency. But over time, the water became pretty murky because everyone wanted a piece of the action. Vendor products that were never “green” before were suddenly labled as “green”. Product recycling became “green”. Anything that saved time or effort became “green”. While Green Grid, ASHRAE and others are helping to clear up what “Green Computing” means, the term has certainly suffered from a lack of clarity because of a lack of classification and definition.

There are some areas of the cloud that, IMHO, would benefit customers if standardized. Cloud computing, if it is truly “utility, service-based computing” has to arrive at the point where it can be self-service, trustworthy, reliable, inexpensive, easy-to-use, enable workload mobility, etc. That level of utility requires that we all have a common understanding and reasonable expectation that the cloud works the same (or very similar) everywhere. Just like electricity (the ultimate utility), we expect that the 3-prong outlets in the US are 110v, we will want cloud infrastructure providers to have a common idea of what a CPU cycle is or virtual machine is. If the outlet in my home is 110v and the outlet in my neighbor’s home is 175v (or something odd), we would all need to adjust everyday appliances to every house’s quirky little grid. Alas, I don’t think this will happen in the long term.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in favor of tons of standards. There are plenty of standards that have gone no where (again, market defining the relevance). Heck, I’ve helped write some of them. But there are some things that we just plain need (think DNS for the Internet). I mean, how do we solve network connection fixup when workloads move? What about storage connectivity and latency? How about a common way to initiate service or an XML-based definition for SLAs?

The problem is, as Stu pointed out, is the work is very immature right now. IMHO, we need to first identify what we need….the wiki (anthology) and taxonomy is as good place to start.

What would be very useful, if that Wiki that you guys talked about comes up, is to have it contain all the public interfaces (whether network interfaces, SDK-type APIs or config formats) of the different Cloud tools and services. Not trying to harmonize them (not yet at least), just provide a consolidated listing of them all.

I’m not sure half the twitterati in the Cloud space would give any of the DMTF or OGSA specs the time of day, let alone the ITIL work to date (or even Charles Betz’ valiant attempts at codifying a data model out of ITIL). (A side note – OGF president Craig Lee was in attendance at the interop event too , along with DMTF’s Dave & Winston.)

A repeated point made at the cloud interop session, one that I echo, is that we weren’t starting with goals or use cases, we were starting with “shared interests”. Which is true at 10,000 feet, but I think splinters pretty quickly as we drill into it. Some people want a high-level API to build a cloud ecosystem (and no lock-in) among vendors, some want to solve problems that WS-Man and CIM try to solve across public/private clouds, some want to integrate PaaS/SaaS data and want more standards on RESTful integration, etc. Classic case of technologists rushing to solving a problem that hasn’t been defined.

I continue to think cloud standards work is very premature – at best we can publish a variety of ideas that represent the various goals, and then try to figure out where innovation is needed vs. where commonality exists, and thus can be standardized. A collaboration on Cloud taxonomy or ontology probably is a useful paper exercise of highlighting these things without too much effort, so long as people don’t get religious about it (wait, wut? of course they will be ;)