Is Cloud Interoperability a Myth?

November 20, 2016 / G C Network / Comments Off

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Cloud Computing Wargames !!

By G C Network | January 22, 2009

Wikipedia “A wargame is a game that represents a military operation.” “Military simulations, also known informally as war games, are simulations in which theories of warfare can be tested and refined…

President Barack Obama. A New Day for Cloud Computing !!

By G C Network | January 20, 2009

Yesterday, President Barack Obama’s transition team released a new video touting the benefits of cloud computing and government transparency. “Cloud computing, which allows consumers and institutions to access their files…

How the Government Tweets – An Update

By G C Network | January 19, 2009

Thanks goes out to Twitter_Tips for a link to Government agencies on Twitter: a few comprehensive sites posted by lindyjb which includes the following: The Government’s A-Twitter: A Comprehensive List…

How the Government Tweets

By G C Network | January 16, 2009

Last September in “Ambient Awareness. The cloud killer app? ” and ” The Cloud Wins in Minneapolis at the RNC! “, I wrote about how the cloud infrastructure and microblogging…

Bob Gourley on Cloud Computing and NetCentric Operations

By G C Network | January 15, 2009

Bob Gourley, Crucial Point CTO and former DIA CTO, just posted Cloud Computing and Net Centric Operations on his website CTOvision . In it he outlines how the OSD and ASD NII…

Obama Administration CTO Top Suggestions

By G C Network | January 14, 2009

Check out the top vote getters for suggestions to the nations’s first CTO! #5 with 5,835 votes Open Government Data (APIs, XML, RSS) We can unleash a wave of civic…

2009 Cloud Computing Events

By G C Network | January 13, 2009

2009 is off to a fast start with the following events on the horizon! February 2009 – “Bi-Annual On-line Government Cloud Computing Survey”, On-line February 3, 2009 – Open Group…

World Summit of Cloud Computing Virtual Site

By G C Network | January 12, 2009

The Israeli Association of Grid Technologies (IGT) has made its recent IGT 2008 World Summit of Cloud Computing available on-line. Speakers include: Day 1: Stevie Clifton, Co-Founder & CTO Animoto…

1105 Government Information Group does Cloud Computing

By G C Network | January 9, 2009

Mark your calendars for April 29, 2009 ! 1105 Government Information Group has announced that there will be a Cloud Computing Conference at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC.…

Sun Acquires Q-Layer

By G C Network | January 8, 2009

Yesterday, Sun Microsystems announced their acquisition of Q-layer. This Belgium based company automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds. In the press release, David Douglas, SUN’s…

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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.