What are Cloud Standards?

By | July 5, 2014
This entry is part 27 of 31 in the series Defining words

Cloud Standards are open standards that allow interoperability for cloud computing.  Standards give cloud computing consumers the ability to compose services across clouds and more choice about which cloud they deploy their applications to and not to be locked in.

The latter ideas about choice and freedom make standards of strategic concern.  This improves the position of cloud consumers vis-à-vis cloud suppliers.

The Openstack alliance provides open standards for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).  IaaS standards would be most important to the IT operations organizations and primarily includes Compute-as-a-Service, Storage-as-a-Service and Network-as-a-Service.

Cloud Foundry provides open standards for Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).  PaaS standards would be most important to software developers and includes Lifecycle Management Services, Middleware application deployment and management, and Cloud Integration Services.

OASIS provides open standards for interoperability of applications in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Business-Process-as-a-Service (BPaaS).  Application interoperability standards are most important to user groups (and the IT groups that support them).  See Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA).

A good read about Openstack and OASIS is Eric Knorr’s  What IBM’s embrace of OpenStack really means in InfoWorld (March 2013).

IBM organizes its view on cloud computing and related open standards and provides guidance on how to build cloud solutions in its Cloud Computing Reference Architecture (CCRA).  For Cloud Service Providers, in addition to basic Cloud Services, the CCRA adds a Common Cloud Management Platform (CCMP) which includes Operational Support Services (OSS) and Business Support Services (BSS).

Standards will also cover Cloud Consumer Services such as Cloud Service Integration tools, as well as Service Creation Tools for Cloud Service Creators.

 

Series Navigation<< What is a Potential Trend?What is VisaNet? >>

3 thoughts on “What are Cloud Standards?

  1. Pingback: Technology Trend: Cloud Computing | Alan Street

  2. Pingback: What is Cloud Computing? | Alan Street

  3. Pingback: Strategic Technology: DevOps (Bluemix) | Alan Street

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *