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Is a standard for cloud portability necessary? And will it be effective?
Several large companies in the IT space today unveiled TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications), a document that sets the template for cloud portability and interoperability, specifically as it relates to hybrid clouds. What are your thoughts on this effort?
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2 Answers
TOSCA has two sides in my opinion: one overt and the other covert. The overt positioning is that building knowledge on a particular cloud platform that is not usable by any other platform is a sunk investment that raises the costs for switching service providers, and, hence, becomes another factor in a customer choosing to switch. Think about the impact phone number portability has had on the mobile phone market allowing customers to overcome the hassle of having to change their phone number when switching carriers. TOSCA holds the potential to do that for cloud computing.
The covert mission by these particular companies is take out the king of the hill, Amazon Web Services. AWS already offers their CloudFormation technology, which allows users to define a specific environment and then automate the deployment of that environment into any other region or to create a separate, but identical, deployment. For example, an AWS partner could develop a common deployment for Sharepoint or a multi-tiered web application. Moreover, the templates are JSON formatted text, which means they could be replicated for use on other platform.
Additionally, there are other open source orchestration and automation efforts, such as Chef and Puppet that are today de jure standards and quite popular with DevOps resources, which could easily have represented a great starting point for an earnest standard for Topology and Orchestration versus starting from scratch.
For me, I believe for these vendors, the covert mission is more important than the overt one at this time. If AWS' JSON format becomes the standard for defining service templates, they will continue to have the upper hand in driving cloud standards by demonstration and not committee. Microsoft accomplished this in the 80's and 90's and the results are irrefutable.
--JPM
http://about.me/jpmorgenthal
Without the introduction of a standard, it is not likely that vendors will go out of their way to make their clouds portable in the near-term. A lack of portability in the cloud aids the vendors, who can more easily achieve lock-in. Portability aids customers, who need to balance the strengths of any particular vendor's service against the risk of not being able to leave that vendor in an easy way, should it become necessary to do so. Therefore, a standard for portability is definitely necessary -- especially to support hybrid clouds.
Will it be effective? Different question altogether. :)
I'm inclined to think that with the right people backing such a standard and with enough customers insisting that vendors adhere to such a standard, that it will come about sooner than later. But I also expect that there will be a few bumps along the way, and that cloud vendors will provide other hooks in an attempt to lock customers in.
So, in short:
-- Necessary: Yes
-- Effective: Eventually
What remains to be seen is how long it will take for viable portability of all but the simplest clouds to come into play, at what price point, and what the scope of portability will be. (Today, you can experience the pain of non-portable cloud *within* the service offerings of a single vendor.)
It is something that I'm going to be eager to push with vendors over the next year...
-ASB: http://XeeMe.com/AndrewBaker
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