The IEEE Gets into Cloud InteroperabilityThe IEEE Gets into Cloud Interoperability

It’s going to happen one day: You want to move a workload from one cloud service provider another provider seamlessly. There'll need to be a standard to support the move.

It's going to happen one day: You want to move a workload from one cloud service provider another provider seamlessly. There is no standard yet for performing this function. The IEEE has set a goal to develop a cloud portability roadmap and produce an interoperability standard.

Portability is an issue because cloud providers have offered environments looking for workloads that run under one type of hypervisor. A hypervisor, according to Wikipedia, "also called virtual machine monitor (VMM), is one of many virtualization techniques which allow multiple operating systems, termed guests, to run concurrently on a host computer, a feature called hardware virtualization".

David Bernstein is chairman of the initiative's two IEEE working groups, P2301 and P2302, that were announced recently. These two groups are tasked with developing standards to resolve the portability and interoperability issues. Bernstein is the managing director of Cloud Strategy Partners, a private consulting group. He is faced with tasks that will have providers vying for support of their own positions.

P2301 group is chartered with developing a standard for establishing the ability of a workload operating in one cloud to be moved into another cloud. This is cloud portability. The standard title is the "Draft Guide for Cloud Portability and Interoperability Profiles." The P2302 group will focus on enabling a system in one cloud to work with a system in a different cloud. The second group is tasked with producing the draft standard for "Intercloud Interoperability and Federation." The groups will have to deal with breaking down single provider formats.

Both of these issues have been partially addressed by the DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) standards group with its Open Virtualization Format (OVF). DMTF OVF includes advisories and best practices from the Cloud Security Alliance for handling secure workloads. This presents some problems for the IEEE groups. The Cloud Security Alliance performs more like a user group in developing best practices. At issue is that the Alliance doesn't apply strict version control over its documents. Standards bodies like the ISO or ANSI do apply stricter version control. There is a slide show at Information Week SMB that covers "Cloud Security Pros and Cons" that is worth accessing to learn of the security issues.

The question of who should be the cloud standards body may produce a debate among the standards groups and the vendors and providers of cloud products and services. Some vendor groups may produce their own "standards" that are not really standards and are necessarily not open. These vendor "standards" groups are usually restricted membership.

The IEEE working groups are open to the IEEE members. Members may vote on as many standards as they deem appropriate. Interested parties that are not members can submit comments and proposals.

Cloud standards will probably be argued over because other standards bodies may see that they should have jurisdiction over some of the cloud elements. The cloud environment from both the cloud subscriber's viewpoint and the cloud provider’s viewpoint may be considered in the scope of other standards bodies. The Cloud Security Alliance may want to exclusively cover the security aspects of the cloud.

The state of the cloud industry does not allow a workload operating Amazon's EC2 to be moved into a Verizon or Savvis Business cloud without first being reformatted. The DMTF's OVF deals with this portability problem by supporting an import format that allows recasting the workload that can be recognized by at least three major hypervisors--VMware's ESX Server, Microsoft's Hyper-V, or Citrix Systems XenServer.

That makes the OVF standard a unidirectional operation. You can move a workload to another cloud. However, if you want to reverse the process, the workload needs to be converted back to OVF. Cloud providers support the import operation but none have offered a free service for export. Expertise is required for the conversion to Virtual machine formats. Formats vary enough from vendor to vendor. There does not even seem to have a common set of terms that can used to define portability and interoperability for clouds.

Bernstein said in an interview, "As an example, cloud providers Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and Heroku use distinctly different measures and combinations of resources in their offerings, making it hard to compare services and prices."

Cloud computing as a concept is not new. Getting cloud computing to become a commodity service (like the Internet) that is equally offered by many providers is still sometime off in the future. The rapid growth of cloud computing will be a factor in developing the standards. If the standards come too late, we may never see them implemented or the providers may only adopt a minimal set of the standards so they can differentiate themselves in the market. As with any standard, enforcement is the real test, not the standards document.