I have been reading about the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) and its “Open Cloud Manifesto”. I went to their web site to read the manifesto but couldn’t figure out where it was hiding.
From what I saw on the site and the web discussions it seems that they would like to have a common API on top of the different cloud offerings so you can move from one cloud provider to another. On the surface this sounds like a good idea. It would reduce the risk of going with a particular cloud platform and make the different offerings available to a wider group of developers.
Maybe I have been around for too long but this sounds like a lot of similar efforts. There have been a lot of examples of vendors coming together on standards like TCP, HTML, HTTP, WS-*, REST, etc. but these have all come after the market has settled down a little bit. I can remember when everyone was talking about making sure that C compilers were compliant with the ANSI standard. Of course to make sure that there was a differentiator for their product every vendor added their own proprietary extensions. The same thing has happened with databases, languages, and even HTML as they were developed.
We already have interoperable standards like HTTP, WS-*, REST, and the work that has been done to make POX interoperable so I am not sure what they are proposing that would provide anything more than that unless they want to have a “least common denominator” approach to developing code in which case I can see this initiative slowing cloud development as the different vendors will have to agree what the least common denominator is and how each can implement it.
Until I can read the actual manifesto on their web site and not just reports of it I will withhold judgment on whether this is a good idea that hasn’t learned from history of if I am misinterpreting the news reports. In any case I think I will need to be convinced of this idea before I jump on the bandwagon.
A followup on this story. According to the cNet article at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10206927-16.html, IBM was behind the drafting and promotion of the Open Cloud Manifesto. I guess that will doom the effort in politics and PR. I didn't bother to read the manifesto after I heard that it was a PR tool.