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.

I have been looking at the Stonehenge incubator project on the Apache Software Foundation web site. I happened to look at their blog at http://blogs.apache.org/foundation/ and saw that today marks the 10 year anniversary of the founding of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). In the past I have been critical of open source software. I still don’t get the business model but I do also the sharing of code and ideas as being much the same as what I do as a Microsoft Regional Director. I can respect the passion of the individual contributors and the desire of individuals to create high quality software. So I will say to everyone who has contributed to the success of ASF, congratulations.

If you are like me and couldn’t attend the MIX conference this year you can still get all the goodness. Most of the sessions are posted online and you can get them for free at http://live.visitmix.com/ where I can scroll down to the bottom of the page and see in the tag cloud that they have 129 sessions available.