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Cloud providers vow interoperability


By David Worthington
April 10, 2009 — 
Leading SaaS platform providers, and some expected entrants to the market, assert that their respective offerings are or will be interoperable with other clouds. While there is a general consensus behind using existing Web standards to accomplish this, some acknowledged the need for new standards to evolve over time.

In a series of interviews, Amazon, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft and Salesforce.com detailed how developers can integrate their services, while acknowledging the challenges posed by constructing composite cloud applications.

Amazon, which provides cloud-based storage and computing services, believes that allowing customers to do "whatever they want" is vital, said Adam Selipsky, vice president of product management and developer relations for Amazon Web Services.

"We are open and continue to be. Customer choice is our philosophy; we offer a la carte services," said Selipsky. He noted that customers can program in any language, and that its emphasis on delivering low-level infrastructure services, such as hosted environments, does not force customers to make choices that only apply to that environment.

Infrastructure as a service, or virtualization as a paradigm for deployment, is a situation where a lot of existing interoperability work that the industry has done will surely work to allow integration of services, said Karla Norsworthy, vice president of software standards at IBM.

Over time, as vendors and customers learn more, standards for cloud computing will crystallize. "Whether existing standards can be transferred to this case [of cloud computing] or if it's a new topic is [too] early to say," Selipsky said.

"We have to see what we can do with what we have," said Norsworthy. She believes that existing Web service standards like WS-Identity and WS-Security could suffice for cloud computing, depending on the kind of workloads that customers put in cloud.

"That's provided everyone pulls up to the table and doesn't introduce things that cause those [aforementioned standards] to no longer work in cloud implementations," she cautioned.

The industry is already moving down the path of using existing standards for cloud computing, said Steven Martin, senior director of developer platform product management at Microsoft. "REST, ATOM, XML and SOAP are core to many cloud efforts already."

Martin said that .NET Services, a higher-level Windows Azure service, demonstrates how existing standards can be applied to the cloud. ".NET Services was designed for multi-cloud, multi-platform use, enabling use of the .NET Services in conjunction with any programming language (using support for industry-standard protocols, or via available SDKs for .NET, Java and Ruby) on any platform to create or extend federated applications," he said.

Divergent paths are possible
Cloud providers could make interoperability more difficult by restricting client front ends that work with applications in their programming platform implementations and with data access frameworks, IBM’s Norsworthy cautioned. "Customers don't want to look up with surprise three years down the road and see flexibility they assumed they'd get from the cloud hasn't been delivered."

Additional standards may be necessary around data access when customers begin to form business processes out of cloud services, she said. "New emerging data access interfaces that vendors supply don't work [for interoperability] at this point in time. I'm not alarmed, but there needs to be a commitment to work toward interoperability."

Cloud computing standards should be composed at a rate that customers can digest, she added. "We need to articulate a set of things that customers will care about first relative to data and application portability in the cloud."

"We want Windows Azure to be a great runtime experience for applications that were not written using Microsoft design tools," said Martin when asked whether Mirosoft may be moving in a proprietary direction. "Microsoft is already investing heavily here with support for third-party programming languages via SDKs and support for IDEs like Eclipse."

Tim Hall, director of SOA products at HP, suggested that the industry should focus on specific problems that it is going to solve around deployment and standardized monitoring. "Getting specific on those problem domains will help people settle in on interoperability."

SQL is an example of how software makers tacked on individual extensions to a standard after the fact, said Hall. "We perceive that to happen in this space: A core set of interoperability profiles will merge, then secret sauce will be tacked on by the provider at the end of it to differentiate between others."

However, he cited standards for Web services and Java as examples of how the industry moved toward interoperability when there were drivers to force them there.

Despite assurances from cloud service providers, application design is becoming more proprietary, and in reality, something that is standards-based is "just not plug-and-play in reality," said Jeffrey Hammond, a principal analyst at Forrester Research.

"We have to de-hype the cloud and introduce real discussion," said Tim Van Ash, director of SaaS product strategy at HP. "These problems are similar to what we've seen before, and the approaches we've taken before are applicable." He observed that providers should be frank with customers and "stop promising miracles."

"Cloud computing is still in its infancy, with a great deal of innovation yet to come. Therefore, standards will take time to develop and coalesce as the cloud computing industry matures," Microsoft's Martin acknowledged.

Integration as a business model
Microsoft's Azure cloud platform remains in incubation. The company is designing the service, which Martin says will ship before the end of the year, so that both its high- and low-level services are fully Web addressable.

"We recently demonstrated an application written in Python deploy in [Google] App Engine using the [.NET Services] service bus to communicate with other clouds. We facilitate cloud-to-cloud interoperability," he said.

While other platforms have yet to be delivered, bidirectional interoperability is already a reality for Salesforce customers, said Peter Coffee, director of platform research for Salesforce, explaining that developers can use WSDL documents to integrate services, and that developers have access to a sandboxed test environment upon which they can test their integrations. It offers validation against actual Salesforce services.

Additionally, Salesforce has a developer community that shares WSDLs and offers a book of integrations, as well as integration offerings from partners, Coffee added. "Any credible integration provider includes us in their platform."

HP's Hall suggested that there might be an opportunity for a third party to verify providers' compliance with interoperability as part of an overall enterprise governance process. Governance can help an enterprise get a handle on where parts of applications are in terms of interoperability, he explained.

"You may have interoperability as a starting point—or not—if you track and know requirements. It will be important for developers to track changes [made by cloud providers] to identify the need for change downstream," Hall concluded.


Related Search Term(s): cloud computing


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Comments

08/16/2009 10:52:55 AM EST

Good article, David. I agree with your take of where Microsoft is, as far as Azure is concerned. It will be interesting to see the shape it takes once it is released. We do work closely with salesforce.com, building commercial products on the Force.com platform. You can download a complimentary whitepaper titled "Top 10 Mistakes Architects Make when building on Force.com". The whitepaper can be downloaded at: http://www.navatargroup.com/download1a.php?download=10MistakeWhitepaper Also, here is an interesting webinar on Architecting Commercial Apps on Force.com http://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/Tech_Talk:_Architecting_Commercial_Applications You can also visit our blog at www.navatarforce.com for more on this subject. Alok Misra Principal Navatar Group

United StatesAlok Misra


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