Will Microsoft (MSFT) refusal to be part of the secret cabal of "Cloud Manifesto" authors matter?
A secret cabal of technology companies have gotten together some place dark and damp to craft a set of Cloud Computing standards. Check out Eric Krangel's article at Silicon Alley Insider and see for yourself. The upshot is Microsoft (MSFT) doesn't want to play. They refused the dance card. Instead they are crying for an open dialog to forge the standards. Microsoft crying fowl for not being open? Did someone just turn the world upside down? What if Microsoft doesn't play? What impact will this have on the cloud selection decision process?
Implications
The announcement that Microsoft is not exactly happy about the "Cloud Manifesto", a document that lays out standards for cloud interoperability is interesting but simply supplies us with another box to check (or not) when deciding on a cloud provider. The manifesto will not have a big impact on most small to medium sized business. Companies will continue to choose vendors based on cost, reliability, features and other factors. Interoperability and the dream of portability between clouds is an interesting proposition and may be a deciding factor for some. Adherence to the manifesto will simply be another factor to include in deciding which Cloud vendor is right for your company.
The IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) space, is growing. While Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the dominant player others (IBM, Microsoft, Mosso) all have or have announced cloud solutions. Usually, a business will pick one vendor as their primary cloud provider. But what happens when your company could benefit from the product offerings of more then one vendor?
We have a number of clients using AWS. It is a great product. But, if a customer came to us and wanted to use both their own internal cloud and AWS we would have an interesting time managing the two as one entity. The tools to design, build and launch a cloud system locally will be different from what we'd use to launch an AWS system. Yes, we can write code to pass data between the two, but we can't easily make the two clouds appear as one.
Then there is the frequent question about "portability". If I decided I want to move away from Amazon and into Microsoft's Azure, the migration may not be simple. Partially because each vendor has developed useful but proprietary technologies (i.e. Amazon's SQS) that may not be available elsewhere. The standards may do little to address proprietary function migration. They should make it simpler to migrate the non-proprietary bits. Plus, configuration, management and monitoring from one interface would be a great benefit to the system administrator.
My take is that most companies would benefit only partially from open standards. Most small to mid-size businesses are best served by using one cloud vendor. If Microsoft does not want to follow the "Cloud Manifesto" standards, and I am already a Microsoft client, I would not be too concerned.
If your computation needs are more complex and a distributed environment makes sense, then I'd be looking at vendors that do comply with the standards. An example might be a Business Intelligence application that processes copious amounts of data locally but stores summary data within the cloud. In that case, I would be looking for a tool-set and cloud provider that worked with both my local and public infrastructure.
The idea of being able to migrate between vendors easily will remain difficult with or without a set of standards. Vendors will continue to differentiate themselves by proprietary functions. Standards will make management and monitoring simpler but will only be another check box on the decision tree in choosing a cloud vendor.
Quello è tutto per oggi!
-PL
