The Standard Cloud

I have been thinking about this for sometime. We can draw parallels of the current state of cloud computing to the early days of networking – independent islands of clouds with little interoperability, no standards to speak of and proprietary management interfaces. Naturally as the domain matures (or in other words, for the domain to mature) it will follow a path that will unify the control and management plane.

Reuven in his blog has an excellent discussion. So has William.

I have a few more to add to Reuven’s list:

• Application
  • Load Balancing
• Security
  • Firewall provisioning
  • VLAN provisioning (or some form of security domain at the network level)
  • Authentication (OpenID et al exist)
  • Authorization (OAUth comes to mind)
  • Identity Federation
  • Policy Federation
  • Data Access Policies
• Compliance
  • Policy Definition
  • Policy Enforcement
  • Audit
  • Exception monitoring and reporting
• Cloud Federation
  • VM migration
  • Data migration

In most of these cases, what we need is a declarative deployment and programmable model. How the underlying infrastructure implements them is out of the cloud consumers’ hands. For example we might say I need round robin between these instances and the load balancer figures out how. And when we add more instances or delete an instance, the load balancer should know what to do, without doing a CLI for every change. Most probably this iis what we mean by Cloud standards.

Also would the locus and trajectory of the cloud computing take us through things like inter-cloud IM(XMPP, anyone?), peering standards, gossip and P2P protocols, facilities for classless VM migration across a hierarchy consisting of VMs-Clouds-Cloud Federation and so forth ? Time will tell.

Cheers