Photo: El C
Cloud computing is now becoming mainstream and there are discussions about the meaning of ‘Interoperable Clouds’. To me, this term is not easy to define as I explain below:
There are three ways to describe interoperability within clouds as indicated in a blog post by James Urquhart. Firstly: Application/service level interoperability – achieved through standards like SOAP or through more sophisticated techniques like those from Cast Iron.
Secondly: Management applications that can control multiple Cloud environments and
Thirdly: Data level portability of Clouds which can be broken down into two components i.e. Portability – The ability to move an image in a “down” state, and boot it at its destination and Mobility – The ability to move a live compute workload without losing client connections or in-flight state (read article here).
Based on the above classification, here is my view about interoperable clouds:
a) At certain levels, ALL major cloud implementations are interoperable. For instance, the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) standards endorsed by Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware, XenSource and others enable standardised portable virtual machines and as per their press release (read it here). Virtual machines packaged in this format can be installed on any virtualization platform that supports the standard simplifying interoperability, security and virtual machine lifecycle management for virtual infrastructures. Indeed, if it comes to data portability alone, more traditional methods like ETL (Extract – Transform – Load) will also work.
b) At a more deeper/process level, NONE of the Clouds will be interoperable i.e. a process from Amazon’s Cloud cannot invoke an object on Google’s Cloud implementation etc.
When it comes to Cloud portability, I believe (a) is enough and (b) is a philosophical viewpoint which, though nice to have in theory, may never be practical for all Cloud implementations.
Happy to discuss, but for the above reason, I think that a discussion on Interoperable clouds may be more conceptual than practical.
