Cloud Standards

I was asked to sub in as a co-chair at the 2009 FAST conference SNIA BOF on cloud computing by Alan Yoder. Mark Carlson from Sun was the primary chair person at this event. After this event, here are some things I am thinking about:

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Involve non-traditional big boys: Any storage standardization effort without participation from non-traditional storage vendors like Google, VMWare and Amazon will not be that successful. Thus, it is important to actively lobby them to join SNIA and take their input.

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Other Standards Initiatives: Any standard by SNIA has to work with the following other standards: a) OVF a virtualization standard b) SMI-S a storage management standard c) Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) and others server and network management standards.

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Don’t standardize everything: It is not the right time to standardize everything. For example, basic data access protocols from Amazon S3 have de-facto become the data access standard that others are copying. However, other features like policy management, data auditing etc are not yet ready for standardization. That is, innovation should not be stifled by trying to prematurely standardize these features. [Mind you, policy management notions have been around for a while, but the previous efforts by SNIA in this area have not been successful].

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Government Regulations: Standards and technology by themselves will not be enough to bring order into the cloud space. Some government regulations are also necessary to ensure protection for customers with respect to providers going out of business, or what the providers do with the customer data or where and how they store it.

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End-End Standards: Ultimately the cloud storage related standards that SNIA comes up with need to interoperate with the overall server, network related cloud standards. For example, in some cases customers want to move their entire infra-structure from one data center to another data center (not just storage).

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Taxonomy: SNIA is correctly targeting to initially come up with an agreed upon cloud storage related taxonomy before trying to standardize different features. For example, there are different types of clouds like a) storage as a service cloud like Amazon S3 b) application as a service cloud (application is also provided by the cloud provider) like Salesforce.com c) infra-structure provider cloud like Amazon EC2. There are public clouds as well as private clouds.

Comments

[Mark Carlson]

I think you meant to say Mark Carlson from Sun He was your co-chair..

[Andy]

Great post on cloud standards . I am wondering if you can check out my very own tool CloudBerry Explorer that helps to manage S3 on Windows . It is a freeware. http://cloudberrylab.com/