Is Cloud Interoperability a Myth?

November 20, 2016 / G C Network / Comments Off

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One AWESOME Week of Cloud Computing

By G C Network | June 11, 2010

We just finished up five AWESOME days of cloud computing training with USAREUR in Schwetzingen, Germany ! CHECK IT OUT !! Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com. Sure we…

NGA Exploring “Community Cloud” With NCOIC

By G C Network | June 7, 2010

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is looking to leverage industry expertise through collaboration with the Network Centic Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC). NGA provides timely, relevant and accurate geospatial intelligence in…

DoD, NASA and GSA Address Secure Cloud Computing

By G C Network | May 29, 2010

On Thursday, May 26th, the Federal Executive Forum featured three important Federal cloud computing leaders: David McClure- Associate Administrator, GSA Office of Citizen Services and Communications Col. Kevin Foster- Office of…

Cloud Computing Day at DoDIIS

By G C Network | May 25, 2010

I’m declaring Monday, May 24th, as Cloud Computing Day at DoDIIS. Lieutenant General Richard Zahner, Army Deputy Chief of Staff, G2, seemed to get things going with his video that…

Vivek Kundra – State of Public Sector Cloud Computing

By G C Network | May 25, 2010

Last week Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra release his report on the “State of Public Sector Cloud Computing”. The report not only details Federal budget guidance issued to agencies…

Cloud Computing at DoDIIS

By G C Network | May 18, 2010

Next week in Phoenix, AZ, the Defense Intelligence Agency will host the 2010 Department of Defense Intelligence Information Systems (DoDIIS) Worldwide Conference. The theme of this event is “Mission Powered…

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By G C Network | April 29, 2010

In an important industry contribution, The Open Group has published a white paper on how to build and measure cloud computing return on investment (ROI). Produced by the Cloud Business…

The Army’s iPhone Story

By G C Network | April 15, 2010

Sandra Erwin of National Defense magazine just published an excellent article on the Army’s foray into developing soldier-friendly smartphone applications. Giving credit to Army CIO Lt. Gen, Jeffrey Sorenson and…

Vivek Kundra Steps Up to Cloud Computing’s Next Challenge

By G C Network | April 11, 2010

” [C]loud customers must be able to easily store, access, and process data across multiple clouds; weave together a mesh of different services to meet their needs; and have a…

Cloud Computing’s Next Challenge

By G C Network | March 26, 2010

Earlier this month, Melvin Greer and I teamed up on a Military Information Technology piece. Melvin is a senior research engineer and cloud computing chief architect at Lockheed Martin, and…

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Photo credit: Shutterstock

As the industry matures, cloud computing will increasingly rely on interoperability in order to grow and deliver more value to industry. Assuming this is a fact, what does it mean when eighteen major OpenStack vendors come together to work through the challenges involved with achieving enterprise interoperability? Events at the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona helped provide a window into the promise of tomorrow’s interoperable environment.

In cloud computing, interoperability generally refers to the ability of service models from different cloud service providers to work together. Specifically:

· Infrastructure-as-a-service

o Access Mechanism – defines how a service in cloud may be accessed by users and/or software developers,

o Virtual Resources – service delivery as a complete software stack of installing a virtual machine,

o Network – addressing and API,

o Storage – management and organization of storage,

o Security – authentication, authorization, user accounts and encryption,

o Service-Level Agreement – architecture format, monitoring,

· Platform-as-a-Service

o The exchange of data and services among different platforms hosted on different infrastructures on cloud;

o Data compatibility among different platforms,

o Portability between platforms

o Data transfer procedures (i.e. packing, copying, instantiating, installing, deployment and customization)

· Software-as-a-Service

o Interoperability among applications in the same cloud,

o Data exchange and operation calls in applications on different cloud-computing environments

o Software programs that are distributed in different cloud environments and integrate data and applications in cloud in a unified way, and

o Migration of applications from one cloud environment to another

If this isn’t enough of a challenge, one would also need to specifically address the many embedded and overriding interoperability aspects, including:

· Technical interoperability – development of standards of communication, transport and representation;

· Semantic interoperability – the use of various different terms to describe similar concepts may cause problems in communication, execution of programs and data transfers;

· Political/Human interoperability – the decision to make resources widely available has implications for organizations, their employees and end-users;

· Interoperability of communities or societies – there is an increasing need to require access to information from a wide range of sources and communities; and

· International interoperability – in international matters, there are variations in standard, communication problems, language barriers, differences in communication styles, and a lack of common basis.

As one may imagine, the rapid growth of cloud computing and the global proliferation of service providers has created an intractable many-to-many interoperability quagmire that can never be tamed. Knowing this, the Openstack Interop Challenge looks toward cultivating success by leveraging the open source cloud technology as a common integration layer. Participants include AT&T, Canonical, Cisco, DreamHost, Deutsche Telekom, Fujitsu, HPE, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Linaro, Mirantis, OSIC, OVH, Rackspace, Red Hat, SUSE and VMware. The goal was to publicly demonstrate how OpenStack delivers on the promise of interoperability across on-premises, public and hybrid cloud deployments.

Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis, argues that

interoperability doesn’t start at the infrastructure layer.

Although you would expect this strategy would greatly simplify the integration challenge, contrarian views are out there. One of the most vocal is Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis and member of the OpenStack board of directors. He believes interoperability does not necessarily start at the IaaS layer. He believes that applications can be built to be interoperable across different infrastructure platform. Quoting his OpenStack Summit keynote:

“Even across Mirantis-powered OpenStack clouds like AT&T and the Volkswagen cloud, they are both based on the same distribution, but the underlying reference architectures are dramatically different…Volkswagen can’t throw something at AT&T and it will just work.”

In this post I’m happy to report though that the participating OpenStack cloud vendors were able to announce a successful completion of the interoperability challenge. While this success is clearly a baby step on the long and treacherous road to cloud interoperability, it is worth noting because this modest achievement also led to the creation of automated tools for the deployment of applications across a variety of OpenStack environments.The effort also generated significant collateral on cloud computing interoperability best practices and is expected to drive even further interoperability collaboration across the Openstack community.