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Guest View: Reality check on cloud portability

By William Vambenepe

June 1, 2009 — (Page 1 of 3)
Many aspects often get mixed in the discussion around "standards" and "interoperability" for cloud computing.

Let’s start with one source of confusion. The "interoperability" concern is applied to both cloud infrastructure services (in which case "interoperability" means a way to provide application portability between cloud providers) and to cloud-hosted applications themselves.

Application-level interoperability ("look, my GAE-hosted app successfully sent an HTTP request to an Azure-hosted app") is not very new or exciting and is often used as an interoperability smokescreen by cloud providers who don't want to talk about cloud infrastructure interoperability. Yet, it is cloud infrastructure interoperability (in other words, application portability) that is the more interesting discussion—in part because it’s far from being a given. Consider the current diversity of offerings such as EC2, Google App Engine, Force.com, GoGrid, Azure, etc.

Another reason why it’s interesting is because it affects the dreaded vendor lock-in.

The other source of confusion in the cloud discussion at large is what we are calling “cloud.” Discussions of cloud taxonomies or even ontologies were all over the blogosphere a couple of months ago, but not much came out of them. We're still limited to the base segmentation between IaaS (infrastructure as a service), PaaS (platform as a service) and SaaS (software as a service). Let's at least be specific about which of the three we are talking about.

For this Guest View at least, "cloud portability" represents interoperability between cloud services (that is, application portability) in the IaaS and PaaS scenarios. We'll leave the SaaS case aside, even though the border between PaaS and SaaS can be porous if your SaaS application is heavily customizable (at what point does config become code?).

In lists of "things that need to happen before the enterprise moves to the cloud" and other CIO mind-reading exercises, we often see cloud portability as one of the main requirements for adoption, usually second only to some security concerns. Obviously no one will ever willingly subject him or herself to vendor lock-in again, right? No way will they deploy an application on Google App Engine unless they can easily move it to Azure, or from Amazon to GoGrid.

Related Search Term(s): cloud computing

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