Is Cloud Interoperability a Myth?

SOA is Dead; Long Live Services

By G C Network | January 7, 2009

Blogger: Anne Thomas ManesObituary: SOA“SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. SOA is survived by its…

2009 – The Year of Cloud Computing!

By G C Network | January 6, 2009

Yes, everyone is making this bold statement. In his article, David Fredh laid out the reasons quite well: The technological hype has started already but the commercial breakthrough will come…

Salesforce.com and Google expand their alliance

By G C Network | January 5, 2009

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December NCOIC Plenary Presentations

By G C Network | December 31, 2008

Presentations from the NCOIC Cloud Computing sessions held earlier this month have been posted on-line in the Federal Cloud Computing wiki. The event featured speakers from IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, HP,…

Booz|Allen|Hamilton Launches “Government Cloud Computing Community”

By G C Network | December 30, 2008

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Is Google Losing Document?

By G C Network | December 29, 2008

John Dvorak posted this question on his blog Saturday and as of Sunday evening had 52 responses! This is not a good thing for building confidence in cloud computing. Or…

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Now really. Should the Obama administration use cloud computing?

By G C Network | December 23, 2008

It’s amazing what a little radio time will do! Since Sunday’s broadcast, I’ve been asked numerous times about my real answer to the question “Will ‘Cloud Computing’ Work In White…

NPR “All Things Considered” considers Government Cloud Computing

By G C Network | December 21, 2008

My personal thanks to Andrea Seabrook, Petra Mayer and National Public Radio for their report “Will ‘Cloud Computing’ Work In White House?” on today’s “All Things Considered”. When I started this blog…

HP Brings EDS Division into it’s cloud plans

By G C Network | December 18, 2008

The Street reported earlier this week that Hewlett Packard’s EDS division has won a $111 million contract with the Department of Defense (DoD) that could eventually support the U.S. military’s…

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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.


This post was brought to you by IBM Global Technology Services. For more content like this, visit Point B and Beyond.

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