Zeichick's Take: A few words about cloud standards
February 25, 2009 —
Does cloud computing need standards? In a word, yes. Should we have push to cloud companies to create those standards now? In two words, not yet.
Open, honest standards are vital to the widespread adoption of technologies because they foster interoperability, innovation and evolution. New technologies are built on top of standards because standards provide a stable base. Standards represent best practices and pragmatic compromises. They provide everyone—software companies and enterprise alike—with the assurance that what they build today should be usable tomorrow.
We need cloud computing standards to ensure that virtual machine images can be ported from one cloud provider to another. We need standards to make sure that applications can be migrated from the data center into the cloud and back again, and from one cloud to another. We need standards to allow enterprises to compare one cloud provider to another, and to deploy applications across multiple providers with ease. We need standards to allow a third-party ecosystem to flourish.
We need those standards. But we don’t need them yet, even though some enterprise customers (and third-party service providers) are already clamoring for them. Indeed, at IDC’s Cloud Computing Forum last week in San Francisco, I listened as IDC analysts pounded the cloud companies to “listen to their customers” and create standards immediately.
Bad idea! Standards, hastily enacted, can stifle innovation. Cloud computing is in an early experimental growth stage. Sure, we have some well-entrenched early success stories, such as Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com, but it would be a potential tragedy to allow the early work of three companies to be codified as standards. We need time for their cloud offerings to shake out for a few years. We need time for new players to enter the market with new technologies—and new ideas. We need time to broaden the base upon which the standards are made to go beyond commercial interests.
It’s always suboptimal when a few big companies get together to create standards, whether de facto through their market power or de jure through a standards body. I’d love to see more work from the academic community, from open-source projects and from other organizations, before we insist that cloud companies freeze their experiments and call them standards, standards that we’d have to live with for years to come.
Instead, cloud providers should open up their formats and APIs, publishing them for all to use, and then let a thousand flowers of innovation bloom without the worry of premature standardization crushing the new ideas.
Share this link: http://sdt.bz/33294
Most Read Latest News Blog Resources
Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans
|
|
Appcelerator Acquires Cocoafish to Add Instant Mobile Cloud Capabilities to its Industry Leading Titanium Platform
Appcelerator Offers Messaging, Social, Location and Storage Mobile Cloud Services to All Mobile App Publishers
|
|
Zeichick’s Take: Radio moves from analog waveforms to digital packets
Streaming radio highlights the need for streaming applications to be designed to take up as little bandwidth as possible
|
|
ComponentOne Releases a Collection of 40+ UI Widgets Powered by HTML5 and jQuery
ComponentOne has announced the 2012 release of Wijmo: a kit of UI widgets for HTML5 and jQuery development
|
Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans
|
|
Top five apps to manage your workload
Web applications offer new ways to track your “to-do” lists
|
|
Not so fast when it comes to testing in the cloud
Developers face outsourcing, virtual lab management and mobile devices as obstacles
|
|
Xceed releases UX-focused suite for Microsoft’s WPF
"Blendables" helps match user experiences to developer visions
|
Are you at risk for burnout?
Burnout is a severe problem and it can strike at any time. Here's how to tell if you are nearing the edge.
|
|
Agility, mom, and apple pie
If we're to evaluate the state-of-the-art in software development, we should start with the values espoused in the Agile Manifesto.
|
|
RIM woos developers with free tablet
How do you get more apps ported to the BlackBerry PlayBook? By giving every developer a free tablet, of course!
|
|
GitHire: Use Headhunters to Find Your Perfect Programmer
Are you a hiring manager tired of scouring the job boards? Check out this new service that will find 5 people interested in your jobs.
|
The Hidden Costs of Software Licensing
Moving beyond paper-based software licensing to more flexible, software-based licensing is a business decision. There is a growing trend tow...
|
|
Case Study: You May Need a Development Mechanic
As a contractor for a major financial player in Germany, SOBEGE, a German-based consultancy specializing in embedded IT and web services, wa...
|
|
Ensuring Software Quality at a Major International Bank
One of the world’s leading international banks has adopted AgitarOne technology for delivering generated unit tests for their Java software...
|
|
Load Testing Adobe Flex Applications
Adobe Flex applications may be different from applications you’ve worked with before. For classic HTML web applications, the server does all...
|