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Loading ...This post carries on from CloudCamp London, and picks up one of the themes of my special guest post on James Govenor’s RedMonk blog. During the second half of the event I shepherded the “standards and interoperability” open space, alongside Matthias Kohl of Zimory. The session started off on potential standards for system images. While that sort of portability is a valid concern, there are much bigger concerns around standards within cloud computing.
The definition of ‘cloud’ computing and services is undergoing distortion on a daily basis, as vendors pile on the bandwagon, eager to ‘cloud-ify’ their wares. That’s just one of the prices of fame. Stepping away from that set of issues for a while, the critical reasons that cloud computing needs good standards can get a little lost if you get stuck down in the operation weeds. To quote myself, from the post on RedMonk, seeing as IT Knowledge exchange picked up on it:
It is clear that without standards of one kind or another (de-facto or from a recognised body), there won’t be a market, and without a market, the cloud is unlikely to thrive. The competition isn’t as much between cloud providers, as it is between cloud providers and internal IT organizations. Cloud providers need to keep that firmly in mind.
Let me draw some parallels with the early days of the broadband DSL market in the 90s. For many years the market for DSL was caught up in the battles between different hardware+software vendors, each out to prove that their version was better than the others. Eventually the market settled on a standard (initially ADSL). Equipment prices fell. On the face of it, not a good thing for the vendors, but actually revenues soared, as customers started to feel safe in making purchases, knowing that they were no longer reliant on a single vendor. If they needed to change providers they could. More importantly, tendering became a competitive process – something that enables a market to come alive.
The broadband market didn’t learn from this lesson for long. Soon the broadband providers, rather than the equipment vendors, were at each other’s throats, fighting for subscribers. It was the wrong battle. They fought over the 1% of users who had figured out what DSL was. Those early adopters had figured out that it would given them their downloads faster, and the providers ignored the 99% of the market who had no idea what “digital subscriber line” technology might do for them, or why on earth they might want it.
Back to the cloud. The current variations in storage architectures, database technologies and support of network features all contribute to blocking migration between services and inhibiting the market. To be fair, some of these things will end up being market wide innovations, or competitive differentiators, but for now most of them just stop development efforts being portable, and mean that there is no ‘back up’ option in the event that a provider fails. Sure, IBM are muscling in on the cloud action with their “cloud validation service“, and other kite mark efforts will attempt to validate individual providers as good fellows, but that won’t build a sustainable market. Today’s hero is tomorrow’s three day outage, and if you can’t move your application you are probably yesterday’s business.
It is unlikely that a single body will be able to standardize all of the different aspects involved in a full cloud service. Even if they could, standards bodies always struggle to keep up in rapidly developing space – I should know, I’ve suffered in enough of them. It may be that we settle on a lowest common denominator approach for now, and a core set of functionality emerges across providers. Alternatively, development tools might get smarter at providing a “write once, run anywhere” solution.
Regardless of how we get there, the cloud needs some form of standardization, so that a market can emerge and thrive. From my days working with VCs, I remember a phrase “if you haven’t got any competitors, you haven’t got a market, and you have a problem.” Right now no-one is tackling their biggest competitor in the space: Do nothing.
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