IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, the IEEE/ISTO, and key members of the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum met recently to address how they could work with the community to drive cloud computing markets and technologies forward. Jesse Silver, one of the CCIF's four co-creators, spoke to me after the meeting, and Reuven Cohen released a single paragraph of minutes on his blog Tuesday morning:
Yesterday representatives of CCIF, CloudCamp, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and the IEEE-ISTO met while attending the Cloud Computing Expo in New York. Other companies were invited but were unable to attend, generally due to the short notice. The companies agreed on a shared goal to promote use and awareness of open and interoperable cloud computing. The group brainstormed several ideas including the possibility to build on the momentum created by CloudCamp. Another topic was the ability to enable participants, from individuals and companies, both large and small, to be able to contribute to and use the results of broad community collaboration. Additionally, the possibility of a trade association or marketing association for cloud computing was discussed but no specific actions were agreed. The final topic was the need to have broader participation from the community in this discussion.
Jesse noted the conversation was extremely civil, and that each participant contributed positively to the discussion. That alone is great news to me. The atmosphere of the meeting was a key indicator to me about the likelihood that we could build open cloud standards in a cooperative, rather than competitive, fashion.
There are not a lot of details to be had about the specifics of the conversation, though it was clear that no company was willing to make any firm commitment to a specific action at this time. Just the willingness to both open future conversation to the general community and to support the organization needed to make a community targeted and productive is a great start, however.
Circumstances behind the release of the Open Cloud Manifesto on Monday morning--which was promoted by IBM and rejected very publicly by Microsoft--were not discussed. Jesse made it clear that both companies have clearly decided to put the incident behind them.
Now attention turns to Reuven's upcoming keynote at the Cloud Computing Expo, and the CCIF meeting to be held there on Thursday night. If the community embraces both the need for a trade organization and the open process proposed to establish and run it, then this may have been a very important meeting. If not, it will be another sign that the Web 2.0 era has dramatically effected industry organization and standards development.
Either way, the meeting itself signaled the acknowledgment by big business of the power of the cloud computing community. That alone is history in the making.
Update: Almost immediately after I posted this, I came across another cloud alliance that was organized to explore cloud security, thanks to Chris Hoff. Is there an opportunity here for some cooperation between the two communities (interoperability and security) moving forward?
Updated to include links to Opencloudmanifesto.org.
As widely discussed since Wednesday night's leak of its existence, the Open Cloud Manifesto--originally authored by IBM--has been released for public consumption.
This had been a difficult weekend for the document, first outed by Microsoft's Steven Martin and then leaked in its entirety by my Overcast co-host, Geva Perry, the next day.
The discussion of the document has been muted, in part because the document is not a standards declaration or contract attached to any action or entity. Instead, it serves as a simple statement of principles that almost any cloud participant would agree with--at least publicly. However, the process in which it was brought into existence has been debated ferociously and may signify a changing of the guard in the standards world.
What is perhaps more interesting, however, is the list of signatories to the document. The list below is official as of Monday morning, according to my contact at IBM:
IBM
Sun Microsystems
VMWare
AT&T
Telefonica
Cisco Systems
EMC
SAP
Advanced Micro Devices
Elastra
rPath
Juniper Networks
Red Hat
Hyperic
Akamai
Novell
Sogeti
Rackspace
RightScale
GoGrid
Aptana
CastIron
EngineYard
Eclipse
SOASTA
F5
LongJump
NC State
Enomaly
Nirvanix
OMG
Computer Science Corp.
Boomi
Reservoir
Appistry
Heroku
Note that the "big four" of cloud computing, Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com, are not signatories. However, several major players are on it, including my employer, Cisco--as well as EMC, Sun, VMware, and a host of key start-ups and established vendors throughout the industry.
There is a Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum meeting scheduled to be held Monday night in conjunction with Cloud Expo in New York City in which many, if not all of the signatories, and several that refused to sign (including Microsoft) will gather to talk about the future of cloud standards.
This could either be a historic meeting--or the final nail in the Manifestogate coffin.
The document itself is available on Scribd, or as a PDF from the official Opencloudmanifesto.org site or Perry's Thinking Out Cloud blog.
In a post to the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (copied in full below), the original organizers of that group--Reuven Cohen, Sam Charrington, Jesse Silver, and David Nielsen--have announced that the CCIF will no longer be a signatory of the controversial Open Cloud Manifesto to be presented Monday:
When the Open Cloud Manifesto is officially released on Monday, March 30, the CCIF's name will not appear as a signatory. This decision comes with great pain, as we fully endorse the document's contents and its principals of a truly open cloud.
However, this community has issued a mandate of openness and fair process, loudly and clearly, and so the CCIF cannot in good faith endorse this document.
Knowing what we know now, we certainly would have lobbied harder to open the document to the forum before this uproar ensued.
This surprising move means not only that the list of signatories is shrinking further--I have confirmation that Google has refused to sign, along with the already well-known Amazon.com and Microsoft declinations--but that the only open alliance of any kind and one of the chief proponents of the document has backed out.
As I noted Saturday, I think the failure of the manifesto to launch as a secretly crafted, but complete, fully endorsed statement of principles is a sign of the expectation of open process we all expect these days.
Cohen et al note above that they still "fully endorse the document's content and its principals of a truly open cloud." However, they also acknowledge that they failed to grasp the sense of community ownership of the CCIF and that their independent actions were not consistent with the goals of the community.
The post goes on to discuss the need for better tools and processes to identify and support the CCIF's core principles, and proposes a formalization of the organization to enable that.
Here is the post in its entirety:
Dear Friends,
It is with an eye toward an open future that we address the many apt criticisms levied at the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) and the difficult circumstance in which this community finds itself.
As the organizers of the community, we would like to make our intentions clear. The following letter is not an edict or decree. It is a heartfelt attempt to reach out to our fellow community members so we might begin to move past recent events and together discuss our options.
*An Apology*
While sifting through this week's enthusiastic and well-argued posts, one issue rose to painful clarity: There is not, and has never been, an agreed-upon definition of the CCIF. As organizers, we have "announced," at various times, conflicting statements on how "our members" should view this forum.
These definitions range from "cloud advocacy group," which implies membership and organized offline activity, to the much narrower "e-mail discussion group." Due to our failure to better define our project, each community member has been left to his or her own devices, latching onto any number of definitions.
At some point over the last few months, the community began to feel a sense of ownership of and membership in the entity CCIF. Until this week, we had not fully appreciated that the CCIF had become the de facto membership organization for interoperability stakeholders.
Under this new premise, it is clear that our direct and private engagement, in the name of the CCIF, vis a vis the Open Cloud Manifesto, may be viewed as a breech of this community's norms. For this oversight, we take full responsibility.
*Open Cloud Manifesto*
To this end, when the Open Cloud Manifesto is officially released on Monday, March 30, the CCIF's name will not appear as a signatory. This decision comes with great pain, as we fully endorse the document's contents and its principals of a truly open cloud. However, this community has issued a mandate of openness and fair process, loudly and clearly, and so the CCIF can not in good faith endorse this document.
Knowing what we know now, we certainly would have lobbied harder to open the document to the forum before this uproar ensued.
*Governance and the Future of the CCIF*
Therein lies the problem. Consider this: even if we had secured the OK to open the manifesto for discussion before signing in the name of CCIF, there would have been no mechanism by which to formally make changes or give approval. This is, or at least in our opinion ought to be, unacceptable to most of the community.
Therefore, though this is simply a proposal to get us started considering next steps, we feel that it is time for some degree of formalization. This means governance and, of course, some or all of the following components:
- Formal mission statement, laws and articles
- Formal membership structure
- A board or other defined leadership structure
- Formal decision-making mechanism
- Committees and/or formal interest groups
- Goals, deliverables, and activities
- Wikis, Web sites, and other properties governed by our laws and articles
- Financial backing and/or formal associations with industry
If the community coalesces around formalization, CCIF's organizers will go to the greatest possible lengths to ensure the process unfolds openly and in the best interests of the cloud-computing community at large, not for the benefit or self-aggrandizement of any specific member or interest group.
Regarding the specifics of the outcome, we are not prepared to propose or oppose any plan. If and when the time is right, we will create a wiki or other mechanism to hash out details. For now, let's start discussing whether this is the right direction for the CCIF.
Thank you and best wishes to all,
Sam Charrington, Reuven Cohen, Dave Niesen, Jesse Silver (alphabetical)
Cloud computing is the first major IT market disruption that has taken place in the world of open source software, "the wisdom of crowds" and the community collaboration revolution of Web 2.0. The concept of the cloud is trying to grow and evolve in an atmosphere in which technologists expect input on the technology they are being asked to rely on, and IT management expects input on the strategies they are being asked to adopt.
Never has that fact been more evident then in the events that have taken place over the last two days. The leaking of the Open Cloud Manifesto is a life lesson in the way that things will never be the same again.
To recap, the buzz began Wednesday night when Microsoft's Steve Martin intentionally leaked the existence of a diatribe created originally by IBM--an Open Cloud Manifesto. The industry proclamation is being supported by a laundry list of cloud service providers and members of the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum. You can read the document on my Overcast co-host's Geva Perry's Thinking Out Cloud blog.
Since that leak, there has been a steady flow of news, retorts and excited commentary. Remember, the manifesto hasn't even been officially announced yet (look for that news to break on Monday morning)--so everything you've read so far has been pretty much who isn't participating and why.
Let me disclose right now that I was not involved in the creation of the document, nor in planning for its release, but I have been fully briefed through my employer, Cisco Systems, and the CCIF and have read the document. I planned to post my thoughts along with the others on Monday morning, and I'll still cover it in some depth at that time. For now, though, I just want to explore what I learned the last two days. (Just a quick reminder that the opinions expressed here are entirely my own, and not my employers.)
It's an opinion piece, not a standards proposal.
As several people have noted, this is a big deal about something that doesn't set anything in stone, either technically or legally.
Those who have publicly stated that they won't sign have the most to lose.
Microsoft and Amazon are the two cloud powerhouses that have publicly declared they will not sign the document at this time. Amazon has a huge existing install base that most other IaaS providers would like a piece of, and Microsoft is trying to hold on to an exceedingly large customer base of its own. Why should either agree to work on top-down standards to threaten that?
It's probably a bad idea to release even an industry opinion piece without public commentary.
IBM, et al, left the door open for Microsoft to label the entire effort as "closed" by trying to rush to a declaration of success without allowing any public community or industry input whatsoever. Big mistake, in my opinion, because open source software has changed the game forever for technical initiatives.
If the drivers of this initiative had simply announced that the Manifiesto draft was agreed to by the same list of companies, but was open for public commentary before being finalized, the Microsoft post would have looked silly. In fact, there is still time to declare exactly that.
It's what follows that is important here.
The most important quote from the day, for me, is the following from one of the CNET reports:
That said, Martin said Microsoft would like to be a part of the dialogue. He noted that the company was subsequently invited to a meeting of some cloud-computing participants to take place on Monday as part of a cloud-computing conference.
"We have accepted that invitation and we will participate," Martin said. "If there is meaningful dialogue, it is something we will want to play a role in. Hopefully we will use that as a chance to restart that conversation."
The productiveness of that meeting (and, I'm guessing, the civility) will say a lot about what will come of the manifesto. Its great that a large number of companies have (apparently) signed on to express their commitment to open cloud environments, but the actual actions initiated at that meeting--including organization, financial/people commitment, etc.--will go a long way to establishing what they can accomplished.
That being said, let me also note that I'm not convinced that a top-down formal standards approach will do anything other than repeat the mixed success of the WS-* efforts to date. Amazon's EC2 and S3 APIs are already defacto standards (see EUCALYPTUS and Sun's Cloud Compute Service), and Sun and GoGrid have also opened up their APIs in the hope they take some or all of the management standards pie. Already, businesses are out there figuring out some basic interoperability between cloud providers that matter to them: RightScale and their competitors are attacking server image portability in interesting ways, and Salesforce.com has full integration from Force.com to Amazon AWS and Facebook.
So, in the end, this declaration is a good thing in that it shows that the industry has learned that open is good. However, in the end it might not do much more than that, and we might have all gotten into a tizzy over yet another expression of what could be in cloud computing.
John Willis of the IT Management blog is reporting that Reuven Cohen has created a new web site in support of the development and promotion of a Universal Cloud Interface. The concept, as Reuven reported today, revolves around some of the good work being done to address cloud taxonomy and ontology:
We are in a sense defining what cloud computing is by describing it's "components" and their relationships to one another. One that is capable of expressing cloud computing and its subsequent parts in terms of a consensus data model.
So in this effort we may actually be defining a dynamic computing model that can, under certain conditions, be 'trained' to appropriately 'learn' the meaning of related cloud & infrastructure resources based on an common ontology / taxonomy. In a sense, we are talking about the Semantic Web applied to API's or more broadly, a unified cloud interface.
The web site, created on the Google Code infrastructure, provides a central point for the definition and development of the UCI. Remember all that Simon Wardley has been saying about the need for open sourced standards? This is probably as good an example of a community supported effort as there is to date.
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