The "Open Cloud Manifesto" is being drafted by the innocuous-sounding Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum, to be released next week, but Microsoft Corp. sees it as a blatant power grab.
In the few short months since the idea of cloud computing became a veritable phenomenon across the telecom, IT and Internet communities, the one thing that seems to have come up again and again is how to integrate services across multi-provider cloud infrastructures. Quality of experience, security, billing all become thorns once you start to talk about delivering services via more than one cloud environment.
Enter the CCIF, with a stated goal to create a set of interoperability standards to streamline those and other issues. The mission statement reads that the CCIF was "formed in order to enable a global cloud computing ecosystem whereby organizations are able to seamlessly work together for the purposes for wider industry adoption of cloud computing technology and related services.”
Members include IBM, Cisco Systems Inc., Sun Microsystems and Intel, among others.
Steve Martin, developer platform product manager for Microsoft, explained in a blog post that Microsoft regards the Cloud Manifesto as secretive and reflective of its authors’ biases, perhaps a move by a cabal of companies to secure control of the development of the cloud ecosystem to benefit its own agenda.
“Very recently we were privately shown a copy of the document, warned that it was a secret, and told that it must be signed ‘as is,’ without modifications or additional input,” he wrote. “It appears to us that one company, or just a few companies, would prefer to control the evolution of cloud computing, as opposed to reaching a consensus across key stakeholders (including cloud users) through an ‘open’ process.”
He went on to offer an alternative to such Illuminati-style secret chamber goings-on, saying Microsoft “loves the concept” of working on interop. “We strongly support an open, collaborative discussion with customers, analysts and other vendors regarding the direction and principles of cloud computing. When the center of gravity is standards and interoperability, we are even more enthusiastic because we believe these are the key to the long term success for the industry.”
But he added, “An open manifesto emerging from a closed process is at least mildly ironic.”
No word on who has signed the manifesto.
