There is a lot of talk about interoperability between cloud providers. Let me explain the use case. Enterprise A uses a cloud and wants to make sure that they can ’switch’ to another cloud provider. The reasons for switching can be many – costs, better technology fit with new provider etc.
A couple of important considerations for interoperability are the application and data. Specifically:
Data – not only do we have to discuss application portability, but also have to port the data. you may have noticed it is easy to import, but hard to export. The data world is very “sticky”. One of the biggest issues the US government is having with adopting Google apps – They want to know the format of the data, so if they ever decide to migrate away from google apps, they can do it. One possibility is have multiple copies of the data.
Application – the application that uses the API’s of the cloud provider has to seamlessly migrate to new chosen one. For anybody that has taken a look at the API of a couple of providers, you will notice that there is no significant overlap!! The providers built their API’s based on use cases and for now believe that they are going after different use cases/audiences. Even if this converges, it will be very hard to get the cloud providers to collaborate on a standard API. Standards have the ‘potential’ of further commoditizing their business, which already has low margins. One possible approach would be for the industry to accept a defacto standard. But for that to happen, the providers have to start believing that they are going after the same use case/audience. Another possible approach is to have a standards body define a standard. this one is harder, because if multiple vendors drive it then the standard become complex as it has to solve corner cases across the multiple targeted use cases – just as in the WS* standards process.
One possible approach is focus on small slices like cloud security appliance with security. We at Sonoa are hoping the CSA with its customer centric approach might pave the way.
This is a real issue, that needs to be worked on. thoughts/suggestions welcomed.
