Cloud interoperability: Problems and best practices. As the hype over cloud computing evolves into a more substantive discussion, one thing has become clear -- customers do not want to be locked into a single cloud provider.
They would like the freedom to move among the clouds -- ideally from public to private and back again. This would give customers the freedom to switch providers as their computing needs grow or shrink, and the ability to move applications and workloads around as their business requirements change. But users and cloud vendors are in very different places on this issue, and true cloud interoperability will likely not occur for some time -- if ever. Standards are nascent and will take years to fully develop. Joe Skorupa, a Gartner vice president, says that even if an open cloud standard should come to pass, every provider would still continue to implement its own proprietary enhancements to differentiate its wares from the competition. Cloud APIs: It’s the Architecture that Matters. Lack of excitement is not something the cloud market can be accused of!
Citrix just announced a bold roadmap for its CloudStack platform coming right on the heels of a Eucalyptus and Amazon announcement to extend API compatibility and just two weeks before the OpenStack summit. My prediction for 2012: we will exit the year with as many cloud APIs as we had when we entered, and it doesn't really matter! Railroad gauges & compatibility... Www.gictf.jp/doc/GICTF_NWSWG-WhitePaper_e_20120420.pdf.