Where is Your Cloud and How do You Manage a Cloud

I toss that question at an occasional CIO and get marginal lucid responses. A lot of you do not yet use clouds, however, desire after them. Others take advantage of public clouds for non-privileged and mission-uncritical work. A scant couple of has cobbled together their own exclusive clouds .

 

The pledge of agile clouds is that you would have the ability to develop your own internal private cloud and extended it ad hoc to external, leased cloud resources. Presently this requires either a substantial amount of home expanded engineering or adherence to one or an additional public clouds tools and management protocols.

Either strategy is anathema to IT.

All radical growth spurts in IT technologies have taken place when open standards were made popular. UNIX eliminated MPE, VMS, and other also-rans. Likewise, Linux is gradually getting rid of proprietary UNIX and blocking Windows Server growth. TCP/IP and Berkeley Sockets got rid of Netware, Vines and a slate of slow-moving competitors.

Standards make stuff happen due to the fact that it welcomes commoditization and interoperability, the top two CIO damp dreams.

It is unsurprising then that a variety of the smarter industry players are pushing requirements for cloud computing. When a document labeled the “Open Might Manifesto” is signed by IBM, Sun, VMware, Cisco, EMC, SAP, Advanced Micro Gadgets, Elastra, Akamai, Novell, Rackspace, RightScale, and GoGrid, you see that standards are as vital to suppliers along with their customers.

Unusually, HP and Microsoft are not on the list of signatories.

Microsoft’s absence is easy to understand, as is Amazon.

Ballmer’s berzerkers have actually launched Azure. In their effort to own everything, Microsoft desires no part of plans that commoditize clouds. Amazon is a reasonable absentee too. Having promoted clouds they do not want to decrease their lead in the industry.

HP, however, is puzzlement. The manifesto asks suppliers to “ensure that the challenges to shadow adoption (security, integration, portability, interoperability, governance/management, metering/monitoring) are addressed through open requirements.” HP has made good make money from standards be they Computers, servers or the network management methods that feed their still hugely popular Openview suite. Possibly HP was omitted from the manifesto team as IBM/Sun merger talks were in development. Absolutely nothing marginalizes a competitor quite like excluding them from a requirements team.

In their trashing of the manifesto, Microsoft marginalized itself.

The buggy in the boot is that the manifesto is nothing more than a declaration of desire – a love letter to the marketplace. It sets forth high-level concepts for cloud suppliers to embrace and little else. It is a more danger than action – a way to obtain contending vendors to either commit to open interoperability or appear to the general public as old-school lock-in tech business (thus Microsoft’s lack). Like various other religious beliefs, it articulates noble goals with rather words.

The Open Cloud Manifesto internet site is sporadic – more of a staging ground for conversation than a hotbed of action. Without action, without translation of high-minded desires into concrete cloud interoperability, it stands as nothing more than a wiki of marvel. Let’s hope that IBM purchases Sun and repurposes it as the leader in open cloud innovation, making use of the Open Cloud Manifesto organization as engineering epicenter to the next wave of IT infrastructure.