Open Cloud Manifesto now signed and delivered
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.
James Urquhart is a seasoned field technologist with almost 20 years of experience in distributed systems development and deployment, focusing on service-oriented architectures, cloud computing, and virtualization. James is currently market manager for the Data Center 3.0 strategy at Cisco Systems, though the opinions expressed here are strictly his own. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. 
At least Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have the decency to not sign docs they don't necessarily agree with just because their neighbor does.
After IBM signed the manifesto three times (once as themselves, and also as SUN and Eclipse), it must be unilaterally regarded as divine!
And of course they will build their cloud with a singular goal in mind of how not to lock poor customers in. Gee, that would be a change from their typical "a 100% IBM stack" approach.
- by anthony f wood April 3, 2009 4:08 AM PDT
- As this "Manifesto" has been signed, and now the discussions are beginning to get a little life in them it is interesting to note that even in population centres the current hardware in use is still letting us down.
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(8 Comments)A lot of businesses & homes are using equipment that is over 3 years old ( just walk around at office buildings etc and you will understand what I mean) and some is ancient technologically speaking, only last week I saw a system in an automotive parts department running Win2k with the filthiest case I've seen in a long time.
Now with cloud computing we will need fast protocols and fast lines of communication, be it wireless, DSL broadband, satellite or whatever our smart people come up with next. IPv6 will certainly go a long way with providing a better set of protocols, there is also a lot of new hardware starting to be developed.
Computing and business are undergoing major changes and it really is anyone's guess as to how these changes will go. The business world is a vastly different place today from 1988 and it is nothing like we expected it to be. These changes need to be made across larger areas (not demographics but geographically) so that the "cloud" can be used by more people. To my way of thinking this is simply the next logical step of usage of the global WAN.
I hope all these companies pitch in together instead of fighting about it and make this work really well, that would be nice.